


The Years of Pilgrimage

by solongsun



Series: Maps [6]
Category: Dir en grey, the GazettE
Genre: Angst, Eating Disorders, M/M, Mental Illness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2019-12-30 16:56:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 31,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18319454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solongsun/pseuds/solongsun
Summary: March 18, 1979: a chance encounter at Shinjuku station opens a door inside of Die's mind that leads directly back to the past - to the asylum, to his friends, and to everything he's tried his best to forget over the years. Alone in his apartment in Tokyo, Die tries desperately to put all the pieces into order, and in the process, he discovers that some ghosts just won't stay dead...





	1. Chapter 1

 

Sometimes Die got the strangest feeling, a sort of eerie feeling of impossible lightness all through his body, as though he could simply float away.

At five twenty-five on a Sunday morning, the Marunouchi line platform at Shinjuku station was all but deserted. The few people who were there were as loosely scattered as a handful of spare change thrown at random into a fountain; mostly they were alone, pale and puffy-faced from the early hour, though there was one group of flashily-dressed youngsters who stood in a tightly huddled group, as though conferring. The sounds were early-morning sounds: the hum of trains, the tick of the station clock, the occasional trickle of muffled laughter from the group at the far end. The air smelled like soot.

Everybody in the station at this time of day belonged to their own distinct groups, even the people standing alone; it was something understood instinctively, tribally, like herding. There were the salarymen, poised to eat their breakfasts at their desks and then lapse into another happy day of wrestling with margins and tabulations; there were the young people, ready now to sleep off a night of excess and then refocus themselves on whatever busywork made up their real lives; their studies, their part-time jobs. There were the station workers: the uniformed and lipsticked woman in the ticket booth and the man raising the grill to open up the little hole in the wall that sold coffee and pastries.

There were only two men that didn't obviously fit: Die, with his long hair and casual clothes – not a nightclubber but no worker, either – and the other one: the man who had just, after a surreptitious glance around him, hopped the barrier onto the platform; the man who, Die was fairly certain, was named Toshiya Hara.

 

That man was the reason why Die, formerly slumped wearily over the gleaming metal bench, was now sitting with his spine arrow-straight and ticklish with little droplets of cold sweat; his hands trembled no matter how he tried to steady them by gripping at his own knees and when he swallowed, it made a dry clicking sound in his throat that sounded like the turning of a lock, the opening of a door – a door that should remain shut, _shut_. Die squeezed his eyes tightly closed.

Languidly, Toshiya moved up the platform, his steps graceful but aimless. He reached back and pulled a hood up over his head: was he tired, Die wondered, or did he not want his face to be seen? There was a low howling from down the tunnel and the five twenty-seven towards Ikebukuro came clattering in noisily over the tracks, and still Die simply sat and shook. He felt his legs might give way if he stood up.

And yet, when Toshiya boarded the train, Die felt himself rise unsteadily and go to follow him. He chose the same carriage. His heart thudded high in his chest, and when he turned at the last moment to leap off again the doors folded seamlessly shut behind him, a gentle betrayal.

Maybe Toshiya wouldn't even recognise him.

The carriage was empty but for the two of them, but Toshiya was standing, his long body rolling easily with the movements of the train. Up close, Die noted as he slipped himself unobtrusively into a seat not too far away, he was looking distinctly careworn: his long dark hair was tangled and ragged where it fell out from under the hood, and when he turned his face up to study an ad for the Isetan department store, Die noticed a bluish bruise darkening the delicate line of his jaw. He was very pale, too, and though that could have simply been because of the early morning Die thought he had a sort of drawn look to him, as if he hadn't been sleeping. His jeans were faded, and torn at the knee; his sweatshirt was thinning and turning threadbare at the elbows, dangling stray threads.

There was not even the slightest chance that it wasn't him.

 

At the next stop, more people joined the carriage. The city was beginning to wake up. At Kasumigaseki station, where Die should have changed for his Roppongi train, all he did was swap seats to get himself a better eyeline; Toshiya was lounging against the pole now, his eyes shut, which allowed Die whole uninterrupted seconds of staring at his face.

Eight years – eight years gone by, and had he changed at all? He didn't just have a bruise on his jaw; there was something matted into the ends of his long hair and his lower lip was split at one side, as though he'd been hit. The train rattled through Ginza and Otemachi and Korakuen, and _what_ , was he planning to ride all the way through to Ikebukuro?

It seemed that he was. When they reached the terminal everybody else got off, and through the rapidly thinning crowd Die watched Toshiya simply shift his limbs and resettle himself, open his eyes to gaze at nothing.

Die got to his feet. His mouth was so dry that his tongue seemed to have glued itself to the roof of his mouth, and when he tried to say Toshiya's name nothing came out; he took a single, faltering step forward and then a torrent of people began to pour onto the train, coming between them, commuters on their way in to the centre; Die clutched blindly at a strap, determined not to get swept away by the current; in front of him, Toshiya looked sleepily around. Did he know where he was? The hood slipped, and his face looked as lost as a child's. Die lurched forward, got pushed back; tried again and got pushed back; made a frustrated noise of surprising volume that made Toshiya blink up at him, a blind sort of look in his dark eyes.

His face froze. The doors started chirping their warning and Die stared at him, straining for him to take this one last chance to run away; he saw Toshiya's head turn, the look in his eyes as he considered it for just a moment too long. The doors closed. The train pulled away again. Around them people fussed, organising themselves into seats or taking hold of the straps for support; only Die and Toshiya remained completely still, their twin dark gazes holding through the length of the carriage. They didn't say a word to each other, but at the next stop they both filed obediently off the train, letting it rattle away down the track without them. On the empty platform, they stood just feet apart.

At length, and in a voice that surprised him with its oldness and weakness, Die said, 'It's definitely you, then.'

Toshiya was focussing steadily on the floor. 'Yeah. I suppose it is.' He paused. 'You look good, Die.'

'Oh. Thanks.'

Toshiya shook his hair back and smiled, which looked painful with his split lip: 'I can't believe this,' he said quietly.

'I can't, either.'

'It feels like we shouldn't be talking to each other. Like it's against the rules.'

'I know. I haven't spoken to any of the others since...'

'No. Me neither.'

'We said we'd all meet up.'

Toshiya's smile faded a little, and he gave a slow nod. 'Yeah, we did.'

'I...' Die squared his shoulders awkwardly, 'I did keep tabs on everyone, for a bit. But I just...'

He hesitated, looking vexed with himself, and then gave his head a weary shake. 'Look,' he said bluntly, 'This is a longer conversation.'

Toshiya looked a little nervous. 'Yeah.'

'Do you...' Die hesitated. _Are you sure you want to do this?_ was on the tip of his tongue, but he pushed it firmly back and bullied his face into a strained smile. 'Do you have anywhere to be?' he asked instead, and Toshiya gave a soft and mirthless little laugh down at the floor.

'Never.'

'Okay.'

A little blindly, Die turned away. He was having trouble focussing; his vision kept trying to waver at the corners. The air smelled like soot and the sounds were normal station sounds: the hum of engines, the tick of the station clock, the clamour of people. A completely normal day. There was only one sound that was different, separated out as if broadcasting through one distinct and close frequency: Toshiya's high, light, fearful breaths as he stood beside Die and just gently, just casually, brushed the backs of their hands together.

 

They went to a 24 hour diner close to the mouth of the station. The sound system was playing _Make It With You,_ and they sat a little uncomfortably opposite each other over cups of black coffee, Toshiya swaying absent-mindedly along to its dreamy rhythm.

'I remember when this came out,' he said, and Die watched the way his slim fingers shook slightly as he lit up a cigarette. '1970, wasn't it?'

'Yeah, that's right. I had the vinyl. Actually, this was the worst track on it.'

Toshiya snorted. 'Yeah. Because it had, what was it...'

' _Blue Satin Pillow_. I always liked that one.'

'Oh yeah, that was the best. And _Been Too Long on the Road_.'

'Yeah, right.' Die huffed a sad little laugh down at his cup, 'I remember Aoi and I listening to that, in our room.'

Toshiya smiled awkwardly at the table, and a strained sort of silence fell between the two of them. Toshiya was fidgeting a lot, Die noticed, tugging on his sleeves and pulling his hair around his face like he was trying to hide the soft shadow of the bruise there; his leg kept up a constant nervous rhythm under the table. His knuckles were grazed, his fingernails a little dirty where they tapped anxiously against his coffee cup. It was drizzly outside and a grey sort of light was coming in through the plate glass window, making him look grey, too.

'So what are you up to these days?' Die asked carefully, and Toshiya gave a jerky sort of shrug.

'Oh, you know. Surviving. What about you? You live here in the city now?'

'Not really. I work here, so I keep a place in Roppongi.'

'A pied-á-terre,' Toshiya teased, grinning in a way that was so familiar Die could hardly stand to look at it, 'So where's home?'

'Mie, still. Out in the country.'

'Right.' Toshiya was looking at him a little shrewdly now, 'So you must have...a family, and stuff.'

Die took a wincing sip of his drink. 'That's right. I'm married, and we have a daughter. Shiori.'

'Wow. Congratulations, I guess.'

'Yeah. Thanks.'

'So your wife...' Toshiya hesitated, tapping his fingers anxiously, 'Does she know about – everything?'

Die frowned. 'She knows I was ill. She knows what was wrong, and where I got sent. Yes.'

 _That wasn't what I meant_. The words hovered as clearly in the air as if Toshiya had actually spoken them, leaving them unable to look at each other. Toshiya used his forefinger to mash a few stray crystals of sugar together on the tabletop.

'I saw a review for Kyo's book in the paper,' he said after a few long, quiet moments had passed.

'Yeah, I read that. The one that called him our nation's Kafka?'

'Yeah, that's the one.' He smiled weakly. 'Kind of a power couple, those two. Makes me wish I could actually get my shit together, for once.'

There was another awkward silence, and Toshiya started fiddling with the strap of his rucksack where it was fraying. 'Look,' he said bluntly after a moment, 'This was a stupid idea.'

'No arguments here,' Die said wearily.

'I should go.'

'Probably, yeah. But don't.'

Toshiya gave him a frustrated sort of look, and Die shrugged. 'You look like shit,' he said. 'At least come and get cleaned up.'

'I don't really want to be your project, Die.'

'You need help.'

'You are not a therapist,' Toshiya said in low tones, 'So stop staring at my face so much.'

For a moment they were almost glaring at each other, and then Die sat back, looking exhausted. Fumbling in his pocket, he produced a ballpoint pen and grabbed a paper napkin from the dispenser on the table; he scribbled something down on it and then pushed it across the table towards Toshiya.

'My address,' he said blankly, 'In case you change your mind. I'm there every weekend and some weekdays.'

'Weekends?' Toshiya asked a little grudgingly, reaching forward to examine Die's handwriting, 'Thought this was for your work.'

'It is.'

'I figured you had some sort of 9-5.'

'No, I own a few nightclubs. Live houses, really. I normally stick around to check things are running when they're busiest, watch the bands.'

'Anywhere I might know of?'

'Indigo Room, in Ginza. Blue Club in Shinjuku.'

'Did you name them after Aoi?' Toshiya asked curiously, and Die's shoulders stiffened.

'No,' he said a little tightly. 'He wrote his name differently.' He hesitated and then reached for the napkin again, carefully drawing a single character at the top. 'Like that.'

'Oh. Like the flower.'

'Yeah.'

'Kind of a weird name for a guy.'

'I always figured his parents wrote it differently, and that he changed it around.'

Toshiya smiled. 'Sounds like him.'

Die didn't return the smile; just pushed the napkin closer to Toshiya's hands.

'In case you change your mind,' he said again.

 

Their conversation didn't last much longer, that day. Die finished his drink and put a handful of cash down on the table; when he left Toshiya was staring at it thoughtfully and he doubted it ever ended up reaching the cashier. By the time he got back to his apartment he was shaking all over, and instead of heading to bed to try and snatch a few hours of sleep he just slumped on the sofa with an ashtray in his lap. He felt exhausted but wired, jittering along all of his nerves like he'd been electrocuted.

Aoi knew what that was like. _Knew_. Had known.

Die hunched over and tried to allow himself to cry, but nothing would come out. He felt sick and light-headed, and every cigarette he lit made him sicker but he couldn't seem to stop; the images were slamming into him now, rushing through him so fast they made him dizzy: Kai twirling around to the music from his radio, Shinya padding the corridors like a ghost, Ruki stretched out on his stomach, drawing; Aoi danced, laughed, sobbed, everything he did full of emotion so violent that it spilled over, got misconstrued; Uruha counted, leant his head against Aoi's shoulder, bit his nails. Like an animal, Kyo skulked. Toshiya shivered and clutched a blanket tight around his shoulders. Nurses blended into white walls, white floors; Aoi reached between his legs under the covers—

Die buried his face in his hands. A luxury condo, a 12 million yen apartment above glittering Roppongi; heated, chilled, balcony, all new fixtures, laundry facilities as standard and still he couldn't get rid of the fucking ghosts.

A vision of his wife and child, clear and serene and self-contained as a soap bubble, floated by as if in a dream.

'Get a grip,' he told himself firmly, and forced himself to sit up straight.

Yeah, get a grip, Aoi whispered in his ear, and stiffly Die turned to face him. He looked different, and it took him a second to realise why exactly: when he pictured Aoi – if he allowed himself to picture him at all – he was used to his very last image of him, during his last few months and weeks of life: scruffy and sad and sharp, his mouth making the shape of acidic words. The Aoi who sat beside him now, though, was the man he had first known, clean and funny and sarcastic, smiling at him wickedly. He reached up and ran a hand through hair that looked soft and shiny and well-cared for, and Die noticed a bandage looping one pale wrist.

And what a weird surprise, to remember that bandage. He'd thought nothing of it at the time, but now it seemed that he must have stared at it for hours, committing it to memory; the neatly folded and tucked look to it, the smell of gauze. It had been poking out of the cuff of Aoi's sleeve that first day they'd met, that gold-coloured September morning with the smell of autumn on the air, and Die scared out of his wits, and Aoi sitting on the bed.

The way he'd looked up at him, so _coy_ , almost, through long eyelashes. There had been a cigarette in the ashtray that he'd reached for and taken a deep drag of, and so when he'd first spoken to Die his words had taken shape in a cloud of blue smoke: 'Hi, slim.'

 

Die took a deep breath, sitting alone on the sofa.

He remembered everything.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

His dream that night was of becoming so huge, so utterly out of hand, that he collapsed in under himself like a star. It was a dream of pressure, of violently exuded exhalations with a strained _whoo-oo-oo_ sound, of sweat running into eyes and collars tightening around necks as puffy as marshmallow. A fearful, sour, smothering sort of dream.

The house had been dark and quiet and still and he had threaded through it like a phantom. He'd rested his sweating forehead against the coolness of the bathroom sink. His reflection in the dark mirror morphed concave and convex, concave and convex, the whole of his body swelling like a fruit.

He retched.

 

Die's little rest cure was to take place in the mountains. The hospital had been as carefully vetted as the universities he had once applied for, selected for its peaceful setting and impressive doctor to patient ratios, and as they arrived there had been a collegiate smell of autumn air. And wasn't 'hospital' the wrong word entirely? _Sanatorium_ , his parents found themselves saying, conjuring up images of intelligent and hollow-cheeked tuberculosis patients lying under thick blankets in the mountain winter; of wholesome food and pleasant modern therapies that didn't seem like therapies at all, like painting or pottery; of clean and cosy rooms full of afternoon sunlight where Die's problem would be quietly and patiently and above all _calmly_ unravelled. This was the new age, after all, where people knew how to treat these things; it was 1969, for god's sake. Once the knots were smoothed out of him, things were bound to get back on track. And _then_ university. When he was well enough.

And the Yamauchi Hostel was all of those things, at first glance. There were no wide verandas for patients to sit out upon, that was true, but there was handsome wood panelling in the reception area and, upstairs on the ward, a smell of scrupulous cleanliness and a sense of common-sense efficiency in the way the nurse's keys clicked in the lock, cleaving Die neatly apart from the old ways. It was the very model of modern, patient-focussed care and Die was doing an excellent job of being just the patient to match it: he wore a charming, earnest smile and left his crate full of LPs by his suitcase in the hallway when directed, nodding and listening with apparent interest to the history of the facility, and all in all you would have had to look very closely to see the look of screaming fear in his eyes.

There were bars, bars on the fucking _windows_ here. And behind the eye-watering smell of disinfectant there was a deeper, thicker, somehow _yellower_ smell of institutional cooking, of steam fogging windows and pots hissing viciously; of white starches, grey meat, khaki-coloured vegetables; of gelatinous sauces and things that congealed and jellied and over it all the wobbling odours of grease and fat.

'Beautiful up here at this time of year,' the nurse was saying in a competent sort of voice, 'The winters can be quite harsh when the snow comes in, but the autumn is just lovely.'

And it was true that it was a bright, fresh day and that the ward Die stood on was stupefied with sunshine, but the wind made a shrieking sound around the building and the bars had a way of distorting the view through the windows so that the hills appeared to have shrunk back in on themselves, as if they and every other part of the real world was farther away than it had ever been before.

'Now, we'll need to take a look through your luggage and confiscate anything that might not be safe to be kept on our ward.' Smoothly, she deposited a white towel and a pile of grey fabric into his arms. 'Wearing your own clothes on this ward is a privilege, _not_ a right – that's just our policy. What I tend to suggest with every new arrival here is for you to visit our bathroom and have a nice warm shower, and then get changed into the clothes there. Once you're ready, we can take you to meet your roommate and get settled.'

She had said so many objectionable things in such a rapid-fire burst that Die found himself struggling to process them all at once, and so he concerned himself first with the most pressing: 'Roommate?'

'Yes.'

'I – I didn't know that—'

'Oh yes,' she said, cutting smoothly across him, 'We find that sharing rooms can be _very_ beneficial to our patients; of enormous therapeutic value. You see, what we really pride ourselves upon here is the functioning of all of us – of doctors, nurses, patients – _together_ , as a therapeutic community. Your recovery doesn't stop, after all, just because office hours are over. Your roommate will be very valuable to you – you'll soon get used to him.'

Die made himself smile at her.

'Yeah, I see.'

Big, fat, fucking, chance.

 

Still, he did what she asked. In the bathroom the water hissed and fluorescent lights glared off the white tile and he shut his eyes tightly before undressing and scrubbing his body down. At home, he hung a towel over the mirror; at home he showered in the dark. Because he was in a cubicle with a door that locked – thank god, thank god – he did try out the recent addition to his showering routine, which was wrapping a quick hand around his cock and giving it a hopeful sort of rub, just in case.

Nothing. But that could have been the situation.

He dried himself off with his eyes still clamped shut, and dragged his damp body hastily into the clothes they'd given him. Grey pants, a white T-shirt, a grey sweatshirt. All of it was so soft from repeated laundering that it felt almost not there, and the ward wasn't exactly warm but he left the sweatshirt off because proper shivering could burn up to 100 calories in as little as fifteen minutes. The pants felt more like sweatpants than anything else, with an elasticated waist – no drawstrings allowed, the nurse had explained to him – and they clung tight to his hipbones in a way that he didn't like.

'Is there a bigger size?' he'd asked quietly, his cheeks burning, and the nurse had given him a clipped sort of smile.

'Any bigger and they'll be falling off you,' she said comfortably, 'And we can't have _that_.'

Die pulled down hard on the hem of his T-shirt, trying to make it cover more of him. They'd taken away his hair tie and now his damp hair was soaking into the back of his clothes and making him colder; good. He tried forcing a little shiver, just to help things along.

'We've searched through your luggage, and everything acceptable has been moved into your dorm for you to unpack properly. The other men here _will_ be happy to see you've bought so much music with you.'

'There's a record player, right?'

'Yes; in the music room. I'll let your roommate show you around properly and introduce you.' Was it Die's imagination, or did a funny sort of look cross her face, just for a moment? 'Shiroyama is very popular.'

Die could have wasted a lot of time figuring out what the fuck that meant in the context of a mental hospital, but he noticed with a sudden spike of alarm that she was already leading him authoritatively over to a door and rapping neatly on the front of it, her lips already quirked into a friendly, now-you-boys-play-nice sort of smile. She wouldn't even have been bad-looking, if it wasn't for the uniform. It was so heavily starched that it seemed to squash her body right down to a mannequin's.

'Shiroyama,' she sang out sweetly, 'Company.'

Die's heart leapt into his throat, and without waiting for a response the nurse swung the door open.

 

In his condo in Roppongi, Die leant forward until his elbows were pressed against his knees and his head was cradled in his palms. The skin of his eyelids and forehead felt hot and tight and his hands were wonderfully cool.

What had he even been expecting, getting ready to meet Aoi for the first time?

The thing was that despite his parents' brave chatter about the modernity and exclusivity of the Yamauchi Hostel as a place of rest, of recovery and quiet contemplation, they didn't have to live here. They didn't have to think about the implications of the contraband, the suddenly dangerous sheen of drawstrings and shoelaces; they didn't have to look at the bars on the windows and the sign-in/sign-out sheet on the bathroom door that would let anybody know, at a glance, how long you had been in there and if they needed to come charging in to rescue you from yourself.

He had expected a mental patient. A dull-eyed wraith huddled in the corner of a padded room, rail-thin and wispy, talking to the walls. And hopeless.

 

What with the door being suddenly opened, and the window beyond the bars having been pushed as far open as it could go, the room was for a brief and confusing moment so full of air that it seemed to breathe, like a lung. The gauzy white curtains that hung at the windows ballooned outward like sails and the white sheets on the twin beds swelled and billowed wildly, filling the air with a pleasant rippling sound; and in the very centre of it all there was some sort of genie who was floating quite casually upon the buoy of the air currents like some exotic royal, a full foot above the bed.

The next moment, the nurse had crossed to the wide-open window and closed it with a snap. With a sound like a sigh, the curtains and the sheets and Die's roommate all deflated slowly back to where they belonged.

'Andou, this is Shiroyama. Shiroyama, say hello, please.'

A pale hand reached out for the cigarette that sat burning in an ashtray, and as the owner of that hand took a slow drag almost dizzily Die's eyes followed the ladder of ensuing smoke downward to its source; a pair of full lips, perfectly emotionless, issuing clouds; those lips quirked up at the corners into a slight smile and with a jolt Die became aware of a pair of dark, brightly lucid eyes peering up at him through a veil of black hair.

The lips moved and in a cloud of blue smoke they said, 'Hi, slim.'

The eyes gazed up at him appraisingly, amusedly, through lashes as long and thick as a girl's. _Was_ he a girl? He looked more amused than ever, his smile showing teeth, as though he could somehow read Die's thoughts.

'Hi,' Die said back, only it got stuck in his suddenly dry throat and came out barely audible. He felt himself colouring.

'I'll leave the two of you to get acquainted,' the nurse said primly, and she closed the door behind them.

 

Maybe his memory was colouring it in too vividly, knowing what was to happen later. Maybe he'd still been terrified, and that was all he was really feeling: his heart pulsing so hard it was almost fluttering, trapped somewhere high up in his throat and cutting off his air supply.

But that look Aoi had given him, that coy boy-as-girl smile on a light-filled Sunday morning, as though he had known that something incredible was going to happen.

And it seemed like Die's veins had suddenly surged full of blood, and that was what he remembered; not the fear. The _aliveness_ of it.

 

They didn't speak at first. Shiroyama lounged back on his bed and watched with a kind of lazy interest as Die busied himself with unpacking, his movements restrained and uncomfortable; with the window closed, the room felt cramped and he felt too big for it, as though every gesture might send something flying. He was conscious of keeping his elbows tucked in close to his body; of hunching his shoulders, trying to make himself smaller.

But he hadn't brought many clothes with him, and the records he'd bought could stay in their crate, and his books quickly filled the shelf on his side of the room. The final step was to shut his suitcase and slide it under the bed, and then there was nothing else to do but turn around and sit himself awkwardly down on the bed, bracing himself with his feet because the mattress was obviously encased in some sort of slippery plastic.

'I don't know if I caught – what was your name, again?' he asked, more bravely than he felt.

'Shiroyama, but don't bother. You can call me Aoi.'

'Aoi.'

'And you?'

'Oh. Uh, Andou.'

Delicately Aoi raised an eyebrow, and Die flushed. 'It's Die,' he muttered.

'You want a cigarette?'

'Oh. Sure. Thanks.'

Aoi lit one off his own and leant across the gap between their beds to hand it over; as he stretched forward his sleeve drew back slightly and Die noticed that there was a white gauze bandage wound neatly around his left wrist. He took the cigarette from between Aoi's slim fingers but the first drag did little to soothe his nerves; he felt more jittery than ever.

'Smoking's about all there is to do around here,' Aoi said. 'And it's our minds the doctors care about, not our bodies, so it's allowed. Smoke, and listen to music, and let your hair grow.' He leant his head back against the wall lightly.

There was something just slightly familiar, Die thought, in his accent.

'This your first madhouse?'

'Huh? I—yeah.'

Aoi smiled at him, his dark eyes studying his face interestedly. 'You don't say much, do you?'

Die felt a slight frown crease his brow. 'Where are you from?' he asked indelicately.

'Near you, by the sound of it.'

'You sound like you're from Mie, but – but not,' Die finished a little lamely.

'But nothing. I am from Mie. Shima.'

'Oh, right. That's why you sound so weird.'

As soon as he'd said it he wanted to take it back, but Aoi grinned as he flipped him off.

'I thought my accent was considered refined.'

'That's the problem. You're not from one of those Shima families that owns a luxury yacht and finds my dialect a disgrace, are you?'

'I'm from exactly that kind of family,' Aoi said precisely, 'And it offends my delicate ears of course, but here in the nuthouse, we must graciously accept our fellows for their shortcomings. You too, then? Mie?'

Despite himself, Die grinned. 'Yeah. Tsu.'

'Oh, city boy.'

'Not you?'

'I wish.' Aoi smiled at him a little fragilely. 'When I say Shima, I mean...near Shima. Off the coast of Shima.'

'One of the islands?'

'Well I don't mean Hawaii.' He blew cigarette smoke in Die's face.

'Must have been nice to grow up there,' Die said lamely, and Aoi snorted.

'Guess again. Only the worst kind of morons stay in vacation spots all year round.'

 

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence, which Aoi broke with motioning with his eyes towards Die's record collection, stored safely down at the foot of his bed. 'Can I?'

'Sure.'

He noticed that Aoi moved strangely – that he gave off a great air of restless energy that was only just contained, as if stuffed into too small a space; his movements were calculated as a cat's, but Die liked to look at them. When he leant forward over the records, his black hair slipped over his shoulders and fell low enough to brush their cardboard sleeves.

'The Beach Boys,' he murmured, maybe to himself as he flipped through, 'The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Buddy Holly, The Byrds...' he shot Die a sudden amused look, 'Are these _alphabetised_?'

'Only some,' Die muttered, directing his gaze down at his lap, but Aoi wasn't looking at him any more.

'Wow,' he mumbled, apparently to himself, 'There's some really good stuff in here.' He pulled out Die's copy of _Going To A Go-Go_ and gazed interestedly at the cover. 'What the hell is this?'

'Smokey Robinson and The Miracles. You know them?'

'Where did you get it?' Aoi asked, a hint of jealousy in his voice.

'My dad works abroad a lot. He picked it up.'

'Wow,' Aoi said again. His voice was so soft that Die gave him a sharp glance, suddenly not sure if he was being made fun of or not, but Aoi seemed to be sincere: he was still gazing at the cover raptly. 'I heard _My Girl Has Gone_ on the radio,' he said, 'But I could never get my hands on anything like this. Even if my parents suddenly turned into real humans, they'd never dream of giving me anything with black people on the cover. They barely coped when I told them The Beatles were white. I think they thought they were Korean or Chinese or something, you know, “ _bad taste_ , but at least _acceptable_ , Aoi”. So what's wrong with you?'

'Huh?'

'Why are you here? I mean...' Aoi straightened up and Die noticed that he wasn't wearing any slippers or socks; one pale, thin foot was poised on the toes behind the other where it was flat on the floor, as if he was dancing. 'Obviously, you don't eat. Is that it?'

'I eat,' Die bit back defensively, and Aoi rolled his eyes.

'So you're just small-boned, is that it? _I'm_ not judging you.'

'I _eat._ ' Die repeated firmly, sitting straighter upright. 'What about you, then? Why are you here?'

'It's cheaper than a finishing school.'

Die directed a very flat look at him, and Aoi smiled. 'No,' he said in a slightly quieter voice, 'That's not right, is it? The fees here are extortionate.'

He was still holding Die's record; he flipped it lightly between his palms. 'Can we put it on?'

 

The music room was a high-ceilinged, empty-feeling room with three tall windows – barred, of course – facing out at the hills surrounding them. The furniture was a piano, two armchairs, and a record player. A cage in the corner, locked tight, contained other musical instruments: guitars, a tambourine, a zither.

'Guitars aren't allowed?' Die asked, running his fingers over the mesh of the cage.

'The strings,' Aoi replied vaguely, and made a vivid garrotting gesture. He fitted the record neatly onto the player. 'They don't want anybody taking the emergency exit out of here, if they can help it.'

'Aoi?'

This came from the door, in a timid sort of voice; rattled, Die turned to see a shy-looking boy with an appealingly messy head of dark hair; his eyes were wide and he was all but peeping around the open doorway, scuffing his feet in their socks over the polished floor. In his hands he clutched what looked like a small, portable radio; the battery-powered type that Die had used to take on camping trips, back when he'd used to go on camping trips.

'Oh, Kai.' Aoi switched the record player on but kept his finger poised beneath the needle as the vinyl turned, holding it aloft. 'Kai, Die. Die, Kai. Kai's a harmless loony. Die's my new roommate.'

'His parents drove the shiny car,' Kai said, hugging his radio tightly to his chest. 'I saw it out of the window.'

'You little spy,' Aoi said fondly, and dropped the needle down onto the record. 'Don't freak him out before—'

'I know this one,' Kai said brightly over the top of him, ' _People say I'm the life of the party...'_

'You got it, kid,' Aoi said sagely, and Kai came skittering over to him as happy as a child, looping one of Aoi's arms around his own shoulders; grinning, Aoi started to sway him gently around. 'Oh, I know this. _So take a good look at my face...'_

_'You'll see my smile looks out of place...'_

_'If you look closer it's easy to trace...'_

_'The tracks of my tears_ ,' Kai warbled cheerfully, and Aoi chuckled against his hair. Nestling his cheek companionably against the side of Kai's head, he met Die's eye and grinned at the look on his face.

 

Years later, the sound of Smokey Robinson and The Miracles wound its way around Die's head, competing with the sound of early-morning city traffic streaming in from outside his windows. He got up from his really quite expensive sofa and put an Iggy Pop tape on his really quite expensive sound system, but the sound of Iggy marching on with _Nightclubbing_ only seemed to emphasise the way his heart drummed heavy in his chest and its smokey, bluesy rhythm turned his memory of Aoi's innocent swaying into a much dirtier kind of dance, slipping a leg between Die's own, pulling him close, and all through it all Smokey Robinson crooned about the tracks of his tears, circling around and around in Die's head.

He turned off the tape deck and lit a cigarette, letting his forehead press up against the cool glass of the window.

He hadn't understood it at the time – the smile Aoi had given him as he softly rocked Kai to the music; the soft, somehow challenging look in his eyes – but he got it now. _Welcome to the madhouse_ , it said.

 _Why don't you look scared?_ it said.

 _You must be a natural_.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Hood up, shoulders hunched, he moved like a man on the run.

It was cold and it was raining and how the _fuck_ had Die found him? Eleven million people in this stupid city, and he had to run into Die: what the fuck were the odds of that?

The rain brought with it the smell of wet soot, and every pavement was a sea of umbrellas marching along in orderly fashion; he wrapped his arms tightly around himself to walk against the tide, ducking his head as if in defence. He'd been too rattled to get back on the subway and now he was heading in the rough direction of the docks, where the sea carved a great chunk out of the heart of the city; maybe he'd head to the central station, hop a train somewhere else, start again. Osaka was out, of course, that was Ruki and Kyo's territory; he didn't much fancy Kyoto, either, in case he ran into one or another recognisable doctor. _Where else? Oh, let's guess now, Mie?_ Don't make him fucking laugh. Jesus, you spent one six-month stint in an asylum and you ended up paying for it for the rest of your life; who _were_ these people, closing a net around him, making him feel eyes on him?

In the middle of the pavement he stopped dead, hugging himself bitterly for protection. Nagano was out. Even if all of his family were gone, he knew that every single man on the street would look like Kaoru to him; he'd never be able to relax.

And god, Die's eyes had been so fucking _disappointed_. How long was he expected to spend apologising for every single tiny fucking mistake? He groped around in his jacket pocket for a cigarette, but he was out. He tried to take a deep breath.

He knew that he was being illogical. The odds of running into Die again had to be one in a million; one in _eleven_ million; slimmer, even, now that he knew where to avoid in Roppongi.

So why did he feel so trapped?

As if it would have an answer for him, he turned his face up to the wide flat sky, squinting through the greasy rain that sifted down onto his face. What did Die want from him, anyway; to go around, digging up the dead with him? Make a pilgrimage south to Aoi's grave, go pawing through the sandy dirt for his ashes; _what_?

 _You look like shit_ , Die had said, and Toshiya sighed, rounding his shoulders and ducking in down a side alley, leaning against the damp concrete of some building or other. His stomach hurt. He had the ¥500 that Die had put down on the table for their drinks; that would pay for a bathhouse, if he wanted. He could get hold of some clean clothes somehow; show up at Die's apartment, let him know it had all been a big mistake.

He dug his fingernails into his cheeks. God, his stomach fucking hurt, and his bones were starting to ache, and inside his rain-damp clothes he was sweating.

Maybe it was time to head down to Kabukicho.

 

Not too far away, on the thirty-second floor of a Roppongi high-rise, Die was sitting on top of his kitchen counter, a cigarette clamped between his lips and the telephone book in his lap. Patti Smith thudded out of the hi-fi with _Pumping_ and he had an open beer can sitting next to the cordless phone beside him, and his heart felt like it was going at a thousand miles an hour.

There were at least a hundred Takashimas listed in Tokyo. Even if he managed to trawl his way through to find the right one, there was no telling how he was supposed to track down Ruki and Kyo; and as for Shinya, forget about it; he was probably still institutionalised. He forced himself to take a deep breath: something that never, ever worked.

Takashima, U. There were twelve of them: not an unmanageable number. Of course, if anybody was ever going to go ex-directory then it would be Uruha, and even if he was able to get hold of him, who said he would even want to speak to Die? Odds were, he'd probably slam the phone down right away. He had a very strong sense that whatever had existed between them once, it had died along with Aoi: they were missing that third component, that final point on the triangle that made it the strongest type of structure. It was something – it had been something almost like _magic_ , that weird, otherworldly arrangement between the three of them; something that they had wished themselves into. Outside of the world of the asylum, he didn't think that kind of magic was possible.

Aoi had been the first to realise that.

Still, he lifted the phone's receiver from its hook.

 

He had met Uruha on that first day in the asylum. Impossible to tell now what he might have been feeling then; listening to music, watching Aoi's catlike movements, Kai's scatty happiness – it had all felt so _easy_. Maybe it was just that he'd been so much closer to the edge in those days than he'd ever been since; there had been points when he'd outright wished to – well, if not _die_ exactly, then at least not have to do any of it any more; the endless pointless eating and counting and exercising. The thought of it all had grown so huge and so uncontrollable and so fucking _exhausting_ that he'd felt like he was going to pass out, and so maybe that was why he found it so hard to feel scared, those first few days in the hospital: he'd hit, he supposed, a kind of rock bottom. It had just been such a relief to know that he couldn't fall any further.

So: the music room. High ceilings, white walls, a view of distant hills. _Going To A Go-Go_ had come to its emptily spinning end and been replaced with The Marvelettes' _Playboy_ LP, this one chosen by Kai, who had an unexpected but undeniably passionate devotion to Motown. They were just swaying into _I'm Hooked_ when Die became aware of another man standing like a statue in the doorway, his feet looking somehow more firmly rooted to the ground than most other peoples'; he was clutching a thick, glossy book to his chest and scowling so hard that Die was surprised to see Aoi give him such a beatific smile. He released Kai – the two of them had been sharing an armchair, Kai leaning so far into Aoi's side that he was all but sitting on his lap – and crossed the room to gently loose the book from the frowning man's arms.

'Uru,' he crooned sweetly, 'You've surfaced.'

The other man scowled harder and settled his glasses – a pair of thick black frames that his eyes blinked helplessly behind – more securely on his nose. He surprised Die again by allowing the book to be pulled from his arms and placed on top of the piano, and by letting Aoi take one of his hands in both of his.

'This is Die,' Aoi was saying, 'The new one. Die, this is Uruha. He's – we were roommates, too, a while ago. Before.' He gave the scowling man – Uruha, apparently – a grin that was surprisingly gentle, and a little awkwardly Die got up out of his chair.

'Hi. It's – Uruha, yeah?'

With a gentle sniff, Uruha tipped his chin up a little higher in the air and didn't say anything. He shot a nasty sort of look at Aoi and crossed very deliberately over to the piano, picking up his book again and spending some time smoothing and aligning the dust jacket.

'Whatcha reading?' Die asked a little uncertainly. He sent a questioning glance at Aoi, but the other man wasn't looking at him; he tried Kai but he was humming along to the music with his eyes closed and a pleased smile on his face.

Uruha didn't exactly answer with words, but he did hold up his book in a grudging kind of way. _The Local's Guide to Egypt_ , Die read, emblazoned over a photograph of a handsome man smiling in front of the great pyramids.

'Oh, cool,' Die said a little lamely. 'Are you...going to Egypt?'

Uruha glared at him.

'I don't _go_ anywhere,' he said in an angry sort of voice, and opened the book so abruptly that the spine made a little cracking noise. Astonishingly, Die noticed that Aoi looked almost _tickled_ ; he was leaning against the piano by Uruha, and as Die watched he placed his chin daintily on the other man's shoulder.

'Uru,' he said in a gently teasing tone, and there was something – something in the lowness of his voice, the _flirtatiousness_ of it almost – that told Die that he wasn't really supposed to be catching this, but he felt too stunned to really pull his attention away. This had to be the rudest man Die had ever met, and Aoi was cosying up to him?

'Lovely Uru,' Aoi went on in that same strange, soft voice, 'You don't need to be jealous, remember?'

'I am not,' Uruha said stiffly, his voice perfectly loud and clear, ' _Jealous_.'

'So be nice, and say hello—'

'He's making fun of me,' Uruha said fiercely, ' _And_ my dad.'

Die's eyes jerked a little wider open, and he heard a small, disbelieving sort of laugh escape his lips.

'We all make fun of your dad,' Aoi said in a soothing voice, 'Because he's a horrible rat bastard, but nobody's making fun of _you_.'

In response, Uruha simply gripped his book tighter, and Aoi rolled his eyes. 'Don't worry about it, Die,' he said in a bored sort of voice, 'He's just got, y'know, deep-set emotional issues.' With a slight smile, he stuck a cigarette into his mouth. 'Haven't we all.'

But he couldn't help but notice that as he spoke, Aoi had shifted ever so slightly closer to the other man, and that one of his hands had come to rest just gently on the small of his back.

And for some reason he couldn't explain, that made Die feel oddly nervous.

 

Draining the last few drops of his beer, Die let his head fall uncomfortably back against the cabinet above the counter and smiled. Next to him, the phone's receiver was leaking dial tone.

He hadn't understood it at the time; the way Aoi touched Uruha, or why Uruha didn't scowl and squirm away from him. Now, it was his own reaction to it that puzzled him the most: he'd known Aoi for all of two hours, so why had he felt so uncomfortable; so distinctly...put out? In an unconscious imitation of someone from a memory, he stuck a cigarette between his lips.

Maybe it had just been that he was so _relieved_ to have had Aoi for a roommate, rather than some drooling psychopath. Alone in his apartment, Die huffed a soft sort of laugh. He'd never had a best friend at school; had always hung out with big groups, loud and impersonal, and there had never been anybody – not even girlfriends – who he could really say had been special, but that relief had made him clutch to Aoi like a drowning man. A couple of hours was all it had taken to recognise that Aoi was not only normal but that he was funny, that he was _tough_ , that he had the asylum wrapped around his little finger and that he knew not just how to survive there, but to thrive – and that should have been a warning sign, maybe, a sort of hint at what secrets lay within him, but all Die had thought at the time was that maybe Aoi could teach him how to thrive, too.

Another way of putting it: a couple of hours had been all it had taken for Aoi to get Die wrapped around his little finger, too.

Bitterly, Die smiled. As a sort of afterthought, he lit the cigarette and took a slow, considered drag of it.

 

The odd atmosphere in the music room persisted, but nobody but Die seemed to feel very bothered by it. Uruha would occasionally shoot a glare at him over the top of his book, but other than that he seemed content not to say anything more, and though Aoi stayed by his side he talked quite normally to everybody in the room.

Still, it left Die feeling distinctly rattled. As far as he was concerned, Uruha seemed to be an outright lunatic; and Kai was – all right, so Kai was maybe a bit strange, but _Aoi_ – couldn't Aoi see that? _Was_ there something wrong with him, something big, after all?

But the weird thing was that it _worked_. The bars on the windows were the only indication that they were anything more or less than just a bunch of students, sitting around and listening to records and talking about nothing in particular; it was like university after all, or how he'd always pictured university.

Well, apart from one thing: the constant presence of the nurses. They didn't outright come into the room, but there was an uncomfortable sense of being monitored: every fifteen minutes or so a white uniform would walk by the open door frame, as if casually, and peer in and sort of count them with her eyes. Nobody else reacted, but Die felt distinctly unsettled by it; just the feeling, every so often, of having an unfamiliar gaze raking over him. He shifted in his seat.

 

The Marvelettes gave over to The Beach Boys, who gave over to Buddy Holly, who had been the reason Die had ever begged his parents for a guitar in the first place – they'd shown a recording of him on the television playing _Peggy Sue_ in the days after his plane crash, and Die had liked the shy way he'd stood and then the cocky way he'd played his guitar, smiling at the camera like there was some sort of joke he'd been in on; because watching him, weirdly, Die had felt in on it, too.

Buddy was singing _Listen To Me_ when the head nurse – the same clipped sort of woman who had checked Die in earlier – popped her head around the door to check on them, and instead of doing the abbreviated little head-count that the other nurses did, she stepped inside, placing her feet in their clean white shoes neatly side-by-side on the polished floor. Her face was oddly set, and a little nervously Die dropped his hand down behind the arm of his chair, screening his cigarette from view.

'Kai,' she said in a perfectly neutral tone, 'Please turn the record player down. There's no need to listen to music at such a high volume.'

She waited, quite patiently, until he did so. His demeanour seemed cheerful enough, but when he returned to his seat, Die noticed that he started chewing avidly on the cuff of his sweatshirt.

'Aoi,' the head nurse said, her voice still very level, 'I believe there's a rule that you're forgetting.'

Some inscrutable expression crossed Aoi's face, like a cloud passing over the face of the sun.

'What's that, nurse?' he said, just barely polite.

'I believe you talked it over with your doctor, and you agreed that for _everybody's_ benefit, you would stay at least six inches away from your fellow patients at all times. Isn't that right?'

'Huh. Must've forgotten.'

'Aoi,' she said, her voice getting just a shade harder, 'I'm starting to wonder exactly how many times you have to be told about this.'

Forgetting himself, Die took an anxious drag on his cigarette. Kai gnawed harder at his sleeve. Uruha kept his head bent low in a reasonable imitation of concentration on the pages of his book, but his eyes appeared to be tightly clamped shut; standing in front of him, Aoi's cheeks were reddening but he maintained a proud, rigid sort of posture.

'I don't know, nurse,' he said, his tone casual even though his eyes were sharp enough to cut. 'I guess I'm a slow learner.'

'It certainly looks that way. On the opposite side of the room, please, _now_.'

Stiffly, though with a light step, Aoi obeyed her; he kept his head held high and only looked back once, to shoot Uruha a quick, reassuring smile over his shoulder.

'Is that better, nurse?' he asked, his voice dangerously courteous.

'You might be too near to me, now,' Kai said in a loud whisper, and Aoi might have closed his eyes for something longer than a blink.

'Six inches, at least,' the nurse said in her precise way, 'At all times. Please don't make me remind you again.'

'Six inches,' Aoi said delicately. 'You find that to be – enough, do you?'

Die took a hasty drag of his cigarette and started coughing.

'I beg your pardon?'

'The six inches, nurse. It's a satisfactory amount for you?'

He blinked up at her innocently, and her face set itself just subtly as she turned on her heel and left. They could hear her as she retreated and then advanced again, her heels making sharp, neat noises over the floor; Aoi waited for her with his mouth in a grim line, his arms folded over his chest. When she returned, she looked as unflappable as ever; her face was perfectly smooth and calm, like a china doll's. She walked over to Aoi and, very gently, placed something around his neck. It was an odd scene, like watching somebody receive a medal; as if that was the case, Aoi bent his head in a mock bow to accept it, and it was only when he straightened up that Die saw what it was: a laminated piece of card on a string that said _NO TOUCHING_.

'That should help you remember.'

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

That laminated sign resurfaced now in Die's memory; the way the light had caught it, flashing like a warning; the sound it had made against Aoi's clothes as he moved.

He wished he had known what he had been seeing. He wished he'd known that it wasn't normal. Probably he wouldn't have been able to help anything either way, but still, his imagination had presented dozens of fantasies to him over the years in which he stood up in Aoi's defence, told the head nurse where she could shove it, used his teeth to tear the sign in two.

It had all just seemed so...cartoonish, somehow, at the time. It was as though they were all playing the roles that had been cast for them, the head nurse included; it was just too cliché, the stern face of authority and her oppressed charges ducking and diving around her, sticking up their middle fingers at her, trying to rise up against her even though they never, ever could.

What had he thought about it, at the time? Had he worried about it? Aoi made such a game of it, such a big show of laughing at it, that probably he hadn't. He'd been so dazed by his surroundings, back in those first days.

The hardest part, the only part of it that really brought out that sense of wild panic that he'd felt on the car ride up to the hospital and the dizzy, bile-tasting weeks before, were mealtimes. It had seemed so barbaric, somehow, to be expected to sit there in front of other living, breathing humans and start to eat and digest a plate of food; the cutting, scraping, chewing, swallowing, the saliva and the gastric juices and the mastication and the pink, quivering tongues; even years later, Die closed his eyes and gripped the edge of the counter tighter.

God, the mealtimes.

 

He'd wandered in that first day with his hands clenched into tight fists at his sides and the cords standing out in his neck, a stupid smile plastered onto his face, and his first thought had been that the wooden dining table had the look of a stage, wincing under the fluorescent lights and the dazzling sun through the window, no longer golden now but white and viciously bright. The chairs were the same kind that you found in schools and they started up an anxious, nagging worry of their own: where was he supposed to _sit_? The two seats down at the far end of the table were already taken up by a wafer-thin boy who was shielding his mouth with a cupped hand and whispering fervently into the ear of the man next to him, a strangely blank-eyed human who was staring straight ahead; looking at the two of them, Die had to repress a shudder. The rail thin boy – that was who he had been afraid of, with his eyes glittering hectically; now that he stood in front of him though it seemed that it was the man next to him that was scarier, with his still, blank gaze.

'Move it or lose it, slim,' Aoi said in his wry little voice, slipping past him lithely to take his seat at the table; Die was blocking the doorway, he realised. He took a baulking, clumsy step forward, feeling horribly _big_. Like some offended animal, Uruha flattened himself against the wall to avoid having even an inch of his body brush Die's as he passed him; shooting him a hostile look, he pointedly pulled out the chair next to Aoi and placed his body into it.

_Well, fuck._

Die hovered in the doorway, smiling blindly. Trays of food were starting to be clattered down in front of the men who were already seated, steaming; his mouth flooded with thin saliva, the way it always did when he was about to throw up, and his palms started to sweat.

A hand twisted itself into the fabric of his T-shirt, right by his ribs, and he jumped away on impulse. He didn't want anybody feeling the way the fat collected over the bone, how slackly the skin sat on top of it all.

 _Fat_. He pictured the diagrams from high school biology: dermis, epidermis, and then the claggy white or sickly yellow of subcutaneous tissue. He pictured it on his tongue, the way it would stick and coat his throat.

He thought he would go crazy if he had to think about it for too long.

'Die?'

Next to him and from a slightly lower eye-line, Kai was peering up at him curiously. 'You have to sit down now.'

'Yeah. Thanks.'

'Hey.' At the table, Aoi used one leg to kick out the chair next to Uruha, 'Sit here.'

Die eyed Uruha flatly, and Aoi sighed, leaning forward over his tray.

'Uru's not the boss of the table.' He grinned, showing teeth. ' _I_ am.'

Next to him, Uruha seemed to be ignoring him; he was fully engaged in some strange ritual of picking up and setting down his chopsticks, and his lips moved silently. Edgily, Die took the chair Aoi had directed – as if he'd be stupid enough to anything else – and managed to keep himself from wincing as a tray of food was clattered down before him. He took a short breath.

'Itadaki—'

Aoi's loud snort stopped him in his tracks, and he closed his mouth, staring down at his plate.

Rice. Meat. Vegetables. The rice was in a bowl; the meat and vegetables swam in a brownish gravy. The chopsticks were the lacquered wood kind that you found everywhere, and the plate didn't look like china; Die tapped it carefully with a fingertip and thought it was maybe enamel; something lightweight and shatter-proof; something you couldn't do too much damage with.

Aoi's voice in his head seemed to say, _emergency exit_.

 

People were eating. Uruha was separating his food out, vegetables with vegetables, meat with meat; he arranged them as neatly as army men into precise little regiments of twelve, and only after he'd made a complete garrison would he eat, placing the food neatly into his mouth and chewing with a kind of fervent attention, his eyes very focussed. He did this despite the way Aoi kept up a constant stream of conversation with him, trying to make him laugh; across the table Kai hummed _You're So Square_ as he slowly, almost dreamily worked his way through his food.

'Mr Andou?'

He jumped, and noticed suddenly that he'd stuck his chopsticks into his rice bowl and left them there, sticking up like bones. It looked like a funeral.

The nurse supervising their meal smiled at him. 'Is there a problem?'

'No.' He could feel himself colouring. 'No. Sorry.'

He pushed his chopsticks deeper into the rice, and the squashy feeling of it made his stomach twist queasily. 'I just...'

'Yes?'

'I'm not...'

He noticed Aoi's bright eyes watching him curiously, and he pushed a smile onto his face.

'It's nothing,' he said. He put rice in his mouth and chewed.

 

What nobody ever seemed to understand was that he was a professional.

It had been so _easy_ , at first. He could get away with skipping breakfast by going running in the mornings instead; nobody ever hassled you about eating if you got up earlier than them and besides, he'd liked the way that running out alone in the cold air had made his mind feel sharp and focussed. He'd liked the knock of his heart against his ribcage and the quiet streets and the squareness of the numbers involved, that one mile of running burnt 100 calories; it all fitted so neatly into place. Lunch was simple, too; nobody at school cared whether he ate or not. He found that if he stuffed himself full of water then he didn't even really feel that hungry. There was something clean-feeling about that, too, as though he was washing some kind of dirtiness out of himself.

Dinnertimes were harder.

His parents had been so unsuspecting, when it had first all began. He joined clubs, started staying late after school to study in the library; if he stuck around late enough then he would come home to find dinner left on the table for him, and it was simple enough to dispatch with the food before going into the TV room and greeting his parents. Gradually, though, things had grown somehow – tenser. He'd got the feeling that they'd known something; that they were sending him sideways looks. His mother noticed food in the bin and so he'd started having to improvise, burying food in the garden or flushing it down the toilet; there were times when, sweaty and with muddy, greasy hands, on his knees in the grass, his vision had tilted sharply and the sweat had gone cold on his lower back and he had realised, very lucidly, that this was too much now; that he was going too far.

But he hadn't stopped. And his parents had started asking questions, and waiting up to watch him eat, and that was when he'd had to start developing some serious tactics.

 

The first thing to do was to be visibly enjoying the food. Chewing thoroughly, stuffing in the rice; Die smiled and pretended not to notice how it tried to stick in his throat and coat his teeth. 'Mmm,' he said for anybody who was listening. He lifted his rice bowl up to his face and with one quick movement he had half of its contents tipped into his lap. He crossed his legs, and rice squashed there. Under the cover of the hem of his T-shirt, he wadded the little white grains hastily into a ball and managed to stuff it into his pocket.

Deep breath.

Water. He drained his glass completely and filled it again from the jug on the table. The stew would be harder work, but nothing that was above his skill level. He could always force it down and then make himself throw up later, but better to keep that as a last resort: it wasn't exactly pleasant, and it came with its own strong waves of self-loathing that were hard to keep down; and besides, it was suspicious.

So he started by dealing with the gravy. By surreptitiously giving the vegetables a little shake and a wipe against the edge of his plate he was able to get most of the sauce off them. Broccoli was safe enough: about 35 calories per 100g, which was allowed. If he went to sleep with his hair wet, on top of the covers, he might be able to shiver that off before he even went to sleep. Green beans were even less: 31 calories per 100g, or about six minutes of intense callisthenics, or eight minutes of soft callisthenics. The meat and potatoes were the problem; huge leathery chunks of pork, criss-crossed with veins of soft white fat, and the potatoes with their insidious sugars. Die had seen potato starch under a microscope; had seen the soft, seductive prettiness of it, like smooth opals.

He spread a paper serviette in his lap. He had five chunks of potato on his place; four of them went into the napkin, which was quickly bunched up and crammed into his other pocket. He left the last piece of authenticity: nobody would be expecting him to eat _everything_ on his plate, ant it was better to not arouse any suspicion.

He leant his elbows on the table, feeling at once immensely tired. His pockets pushed with food, a weirdly disgusting sensation, but imagining it pushing at his stomach instead made him feel even worse.

'Earth to Die. Earth to Die. No, he has, uh, left the building.'

A wadded up napkin hit him softly on the side of the head and he blinked wildly, straightening up.

'What? Sorry.'

To his left, Aoi looked pleasantly entertained.

'Daydreamer?' he asked, an eyebrow raised, and Die felt the back of his neck get hot.

'I guess so. Sorry,' he muttered. 'Just tired.'

'Well, get past it.' Leaning back in his seat, he lit up a cigarette and puffed on it, 'After dinner, we get to grill you.'

'Sounds great.'

'Well, it's more fun if we get to you before the doctors do.'

At the end of the table, the very thin boy put his chopsticks down. He didn't slam them or anything – in fact, the gesture was almost eerily quiet – but he seemed to attract everybody's attention just the same; his other hand was gripping the edge of the table, and there was a look on his face like a storm brewing: his eyes flashed, and his lips seemed to be trying to stretch into a grimace.

'Who is that,' he said forcefully, his voice as low as a whisper but somehow pervading through the room like an icy draught.

Like casually, the scary-looking guy in the chair next to him pushed his chair out and wandered from the room.

'Oh, boy,' Aoi muttered under his breath, and on Die's other side he heard Kai take it up as a kind of nervous chant, 'Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy—'

'That's Shinya,' Aoi said in a low voice, 'Our schizophrenic. He doesn't like new people – it's not you—'

'It _is_ him,' Uruha murmured angrily, his right hand tapping the tabletop in a savage pattern.

'Uru—'

'Who _is_ it,' Shinya said again tightly, and Die shifted nervously in his seat.

'Hi,' he said a bit lamely, 'I'm Die.'

In a single, quite unemotional movement, Shinya flung his tray across the table; the plate went flying, cartwheeling gravy into the air; it spattered across Die and Uruha and Aoi's faces thickly, and Uruha made a low whining noise in his throat, tapping the table harder than ever.

'Shit,' Aoi was saying quickly, 'It's okay, Uru. We'll get you cleaned up—'

The scary-looking man came back into the room, a white uniform tailing him. His face was set but not panicked; he approached Shinya as he was jerking his arm up threateningly into the air and took a gentle but firm hold of it, pushing it back down by his side.

Next to Die Aoi was fussing over Uruha, tenderly wiping at his stricken-looking face; with deft movements, Die gathered all of the plates on the table together – Aoi and Uruha's empty ones, the one Shinya had thrown – and tucked his own in with them, so that nobody would be able to identify it as his.

The nurse stuck a needle into Shinya's upper arm as he started to wail, and Die closed his eyes.

He felt exhausted.

 

In Roppongi, Die let the phone book slip from his lap and fall messily to the floor. He might not even have noticed: soberly, he stared straight ahead, his eyes distant. His mouth was one that smiled easily, nervously, almost automatically; it sat in a straight line now, uncommonly serious. Patti Smith had run out of steam and the hi-fi was silent. Quietly Die slid off the counter and went to change the tape, but something seemed to have happened to his hands; they wouldn't work so well, wouldn't press down on the right buttons or perform the delicate motion of opening and closing the cassette cases, and so he let them fall limply down by his sides and simply stared out at the view. It was raining hard now.

It had been a different world, back then.

He wondered how he could ever expect anybody else – any outsider – to truly understand how different it had been. 1969, and yet a hundred years in the past, a hundred years in the future; it was as if something had warped, set them all on a different tangent, running parallel but apart to real life. Somehow, the lot of them had simply fallen out of the stream of time.

He remembered how Shinya had slumped over so docilely after they'd injected him with whatever it was, and how the scary-looking man had watched with calm, sharp eyes as the nurse and another orderly had half-walked, half-carried him from the room. He remembered the thoughtful, cowed sort of look on Kai's face, and the rigid tension on Uruha's; he remembered the way Aoi's hands had moved, taking care of him with such a forthright, clear-eyed affection that Die had felt it almost intrusive to be watching them.

It seemed impossible, looking back, that he hadn't seen their relationship for what it was straight away. Was he blind, or what? No amount of sarcastic asides could mask the way Aoi grew so quiet and still when Uruha spoke, tuned directly into his every sparing word; watching them together, it was almost lonely.

The buzzer made him jump so violently that he almost dropped the tape he was holding; it seemed to vibrate through his whole apartment, making his teeth rattle.

He knew he should see to it, but he just stood there. He dropped his gaze down to his hands and noticed he was holding a Rolling Stones tape, _Exile on Main St._ ; that one had come out in 1972, just one year – just one year _after_ – and fuck, oh fuck, Aoi would have loved this fucking tape. With hands that wanted to shake, Die jammed it into the cassette deck and punched the play button.

Then, with feet that felt heavy, he went to go and answer the buzzer, and after a one-word conversation through the intercom, he pressed the door release.

 

He'd forgotten, or perhaps never known, that Toshiya didn't like elevators. By the time he reached Die's apartment he was looking drawn and haggard and breathless and the Stones were almost through with _Rocks Off_ ; Mick Jagger was drawling _the_ _sunshine bores the daylights out of me_ and the sky outside felt darker and Toshiya was shivering and dripping all over Die's genkan.

'Good song,' he said, his voice juddering uncontrollably, 'I always liked _Tumbling Dice_ on this album.'

He paused, looking lost, and jammed his hands in his pockets. 'Nice place.'

'Thanks. It's...'

He turned his eyes around his apartment as if seeing it for the first time. He noticed the crumpled beer cans littering the countertop, the phone book still with its pages fanned lazily open on the floor; more than that, though, he noticed how those things were the only real sign of life. Other than the mess, it looked like a show home, or a hotel room. There wasn't a single touch that could be called personal.

Maybe for that reason, he closed the front door behind Toshiya, sealing him inside. He nodded towards his ragged rucksack.

'Are you carrying?' he asked bluntly, and Toshiya tried for a light smile.

'Why, you want some?'

'You can't bring that shit into my apartment,' Die said, and Toshiya swallowed, ducking his head.

'I don't have any,' he said. 'I promise.'

He hesitated, and then opened his bag and kicked it across the floor. 'Look, if you want. There's – there's a needle, but it's done with, I already shot up.'

'When did you last...?'

'A couple of hours ago.' Lopsidedly he shrugged. 'I should be good for the next five, six hours or so.'

'Jesus,' Die said, his voice surprising him by how bitter it was, and Toshiya made a motion that was a cross between a shrug and a flinch.

'Longer,' he muttered apologetically, 'If you've got something I can sort of...temper it with. If you've got oxy, or something like—'

'I don't have anything,' Die said, more harshly than he felt. 'I don't...I don't keep stuff like that here.' He paused. 'You sure you still want to stay?'

And god, Toshiya looked so _scared_ as he nodded.

'If you'll still have me. Yeah.'

Die took in a soft breath, and in his head he saw the smooth, tender movements of Aoi's hands, the care he took, light and focussed as some miniaturist artisan, aware of every breath. And before him, he saw the way Toshiya clamped his skinny arms in a deadlock around his own body, bruisingly tight, trying to stifle the shivers that tore through him: the dirty clothes, the frayed hair, the absolute _carelessness_ of it all – the look of a body that had been abandoned up to something; left to be dragged along and dragged apart by the wind.

'I'll still have you,' he said, and neither of them smiled at each other. It felt like a contract, that was why. Like they were locking themselves into something.

Still, it was a surprise when Toshiya stuck his hand out, clasping Die's fingers in his own. Solemnly, they shook. Toshiya's hand in his felt strange, so much larger than his wife's; the fingers longer, colder, more determined; the palm wider, wet with rainwater; the wrist so delicately strung with bone. He had the look, Die thought suddenly, of something only just held together, something fragile, like a bird; something that might have been completely hollow on the inside, and full of air, and full of light.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

In the sanatorium, the night had come quietly. Die had watched it come in through the bars on his windows, the darkness gathering slowly, like dust at the corners of the glass pane beyond. There was relief – the relief of dinner being out of the way, finally – so strong that it left him feeling weak and depleted; there was a nagging guilt, hanging heavy from his neck to pull his head down into a stooped little bow; there was disgust, like a burning taste at the back of his throat that no amount of swallowing could clear.

And there was quiet.

It seemed that the grilling Aoi had threatened him with wouldn't come; not on that first night. When dinner was over he took off without a single glance behind him, following a tense-looking Uruha down the corridor; he had a pensive, anxious sort of look on his face, and the way he hurried to keep up with Uruha's quick, long strides gave him the meek look of a slave. Whatever scream that had coiled itself in Shinya's throat had been shut up somewhere behind a closed door, and Die couldn't hear it any more. Even Kai had bundled himself away into his dorm with his roommate, and the scary-looking man had obviously sequestered himself, too; he was nowhere to be seen.

He was completely alone.

He reminded himself that this had been what he had hoped for – _more_ than he had hoped for. Being alone had enabled him to dispose of the food he'd squirrelled away without awkward questions; had allowed him to close the door of his dorm room behind him and lie down on the cold, polished floor and do sit-ups until his muscles felt taut as wires and his vision was narrowed down to two hot and pulsing pinpricks, his mind sharp with focus. He switched to press-ups, not letting his elbows shake but instead keeping them steadily moving and easing themselves into position, his belly clamped in tight. He counted in sets of 20. His breath made a rasping sound.

Out over the surrounding hills, the light was putting up one last-ditch effort, streaming orange through the bars to cast their shadows high on the wall behind him. He'd never seen a sunset look this abandoned.

 

He thought now that he must have wondered what Aoi was doing; what could possibly cause him to go so quiet, so breathless, every time Uruha so much as twitched. It seemed inconceivable that there was a time in that silent, lonely place when Aoi wasn't his every aching thought, but he supposed it must have been true then. The thought made him feel strange, as though he was looking through a telescope at some dim and distant Die who was not much relation to the man he was now, blank and somehow unformed, smoothed out like a child, like an unhatched egg.

What else could he possibly have been thinking about?

With the hills and the sky laid out so far before him, so empty and so quiet, it had felt comfortingly like the end of the world. When he'd at last fallen panting onto his bed, every limb weak, his mind had felt completely blank. There was a hot, tight headache banding around his temples, and he rubbed a harsh hand over the sick, sharp pain in his stomach. As the darkness gathered in his dorm room he had become aware of the strip of light that showed under the doorway out to the hall, thin and white as a blade, and he had understood almost instinctively that the light out there was one that would never, ever be switched off.

Palely, he was sweating. His body curled loosely on the bed. He considered trying to touch himself, that maybe if he just held his patience and dedicated enough time to it then perhaps he'd be able to force some sort of reaction out of his stupid fucking body, but the thought just made him feel tired.

Where his family lived in Tsu, the sun set every night over the sea, and everything for miles and miles ahead over that glittering bay would be set ablaze in that last, fierce stand at the end of the day.

 

Playing the host, he showed Toshiya where the bathroom was. He led him inside and demonstrated the controls of the shower, padded around finding clean clothes for him to wear; accepted the limp bundle of rainsoaked fabric that Toshiya handed silently to him through a sliver of open doorway and slung it straight into the washing machine. Inside the shower clattered and outside rain pecked at the windows.

He remembered Toshiya crouched down in a stairwell, picking quickly and competently at the lock that led to the secret, hushed, upstairs ward where Aoi was being held; his princess in the tower, enchanted into a hundred years of drugged sleep. He remembered the grin on his face as he'd – how had Die put it then – oh, yeah, thrown himself on the grenade. Stupid turn of phrase; stupid when you thought that what he'd really been was the white knight charging in, his spear forgotten, sacrificing himself to the dragon. His body as he'd run down the hallway had been a beautiful thing, long and strong and young in the sort of way that could have lived forever; he had skidded, rounding the corner; he had grinned, laughed. The risk had made it fun for him. _That_ boy would never have let himself become so dirty and stained and crumpled, so used up, so beaten down.

Maybe the man in Die's bathroom was an imposter.

Their damsel in distress, Aoi had been tied down to the bed. He remembered how they'd worked him free, their hands slipping and clawing at the knots, and how Aoi had stirred. He remembered the habit he had, the strange little habit he'd had of reaching out and just touching at Die's waist. Such a light touch, so much more intimate than anything else he could have done; touching him just to feel the shape of him, to let him feel the warmth of his fingers. So gently, his hand had spanned out across the drum-tight stretch of skin between Die's ribcage and his hips, and everywhere he touched Die had felt a breathless kind of warmth flow though him, as though Aoi was not just feeling him but streaming into him, melding with him, forging a better part of him.

That smooth as water, molten metal feel to him.

Die's eyes stung. Quickly he turned them up to the ceiling, hardly daring to blink; a thick, pinched sort of feeling had come into his throat as his vision blurred, and tightly he squeezed his hands into fists until he felt he had himself under control again. The shower had cranked off and the sound of Toshiya's bare feet padding around through the half-open door was a merciful distraction; Die sniffed harshly, swiped a hand over his face, raked his hands through his hair. He would be putting on Die's clothes, now; he would be brushing his teeth with the spare toothbrush Die had left out for him. He'd be towel-drying his hair, and maybe he'd be looking at his reflection in the foggy mirror, staring into his own eyes and daring himself to be strong enough to do this; to hold his head high.

When he appeared it was with a shy smile and the scrubbed, flushed, chastened look of somebody scalded by very hot water. Steam unfolded from his skin, as though he was billowing in on a cloud.

'Thanks for that,' he said in a voice that tried to be casual. 'Feels better.'

'My clothes fit you.'

'Yeah.' Toshiya held his arms out, awkwardly performing a mannequin pose, 'Not bad.'

He had aged, of course, in the eight years that had passed since Die last saw him. It was hard to say exactly how. There was something both harder and more fragile to him, as though the years had made him brittle; his eyes had lost some of their roundness and softness, the trick they'd once had of looking innocent.

They looked at each other, and Die thought Toshiya might have been sizing him up in the same way, reading the changes that the passing years had made to his face. Tentatively, they smiled at each other, and Toshiya lowered his gaze.

'Sit down,' Die said, suddenly gauche. 'Please.'

He sat down himself, as if to demonstrate, and with a characteristically lopsided sort of gesture that almost sent Die spinning helplessly into the past, Toshiya dropped himself down onto the sofa. He crossed his legs under him, tugging his shins neatly into place with his hands. There was a quiet between them that wasn't exactly uncomfortable, stretching forth over the gentle pattering of the rain, and then Toshiya gave a soft, snorting sort of laugh.

'What?'

'Nothing! Sorry. Nothing, really. It's just that you still sit in the same way.'

He set his bare feet delicately on the wooden floor and spread his knees wide apart to demonstrate, allowing himself to slouch down onto his lower back. 'I can just still see you, really clearly, sitting like this in that armchair in the music room.'

Die tucked a smile into the cup of his hand. 'All that furniture looked like somebody had died on it.'

'It did! It really did. Everybody was always so rough on it. The arms of the sofa had totally collapsed from people sitting on them all the time.'

'And Ruki sitting on the back of it, digging his feet in between the cushions.'

'The nurses _hated_ that.'

They smiled at each other; genuine smiles, easier this time.

'I can just really see it,' Toshiya repeated a little wistfully, rubbing at his bare arms. Die wondered if he was cold, but he seemed to just be enjoying the feel of his own body. At the crook of each elbow the skin went dark-coloured, smeary, as if filthy, but with the angle he was holding himself at those poisonous marks could almost have been just shadows, playing out sleepily over his skin.

 

'I can't remember,' Die said slowly, 'How we managed to feel that way, back then. You know what I mean?'

'So strong,' Toshiya agreed, his voice an appealing little croak.

'It was...we were all ill. You know? So I can't figure out why we felt so much like...'

'Like we'd be young forever,' Toshiya substituted, and Die nodded, his hair swaying around his face. He let it hang there, shielding him from view.

There was a short silence in which Toshiya waited whilst he struggled.

'I thought it was him,' Die admitted finally. 'Making me feel like that.'

'Aoi?'

Die nodded and Toshiya pulled his knees back up, hugging them to his chest and resting his pointy little chin on top of them.

'Maybe it was,' he said, his voice a little muffled from the position he held himself at. 'Why not?'

Die smiled. 'Doesn't make sense. Not if you felt it too.'

'Maybe it was something different for all of us. Maybe everyone feels that way when they're that age.'

Die looked at him, and he shrugged. 'Stranger things happen at sea,' he added lightly, and Die huffed a tired sort of laugh.

'So what was it for you, then?'

'Really, you mean?'

'Yeah, really.'

Toshiya paused, biting at his lower lip. He dug his fingernails lightly into his upper arm.

'I don't know,' he said carefully. 'I guess it just all felt...possible. Like I could still be fixed.' He hugged his knees a little tighter. 'People kept saying to me that I had to _want_ it. Had to _want_ to be better. What they meant was that I had to work for it, but I just...I never got that. Never did. I still thought someone could come along and crack me, and I wouldn't want to be bad any more.' He shrugged, smiling. 'Pretty dumb, when you think about it.'

'Why?' Die asked curiously, and Toshiya laughed, his teeth glinting.

'Because they would have had to care about me so much! They would have had to send all the rest of you away and focussed just on me, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. They would have had to have cared about me more than they cared about themselves; more than they cared about _any_ thing. You can't expect professionals to care that way.'

'But one of us,' Die suggested, 'Or somebody outside, maybe.'

'No.' Toshiya shook his head efficiently. 'I'm almost...I'm talking about selfishness; _complete_ selfishness. Like somebody who would have risked _anything_ to make me smile. That's what I mean.'

'Ah,' Die said a little awkwardly; he didn't think he'd ever seen Toshiya be so precise. They were both quiet for a moment, Die stroking his thumb over the filter of his cigarette, Toshiya watching the way the smoke from his rose in a spiral. It was completely dark outside now, and the view from Die's windows was of a hundred blocks of yellow light in which singular actions happened: a woman ironed, a man held a baby over his head, a child did her homework over a low table. There was something touching about seeing so many human lives on display, their closest routines laid bare.

'So what would you have done differently,' Die asked at last, still facing the window, 'If somebody had cared about you like that? If you were able to be completely selfish?'

'If I was able to be completely selfish? They let me do that, and still loved me?' Toshiya gave a happy shrug. 'I would have given them everything,' he said simply. 'Done anything, become anything.'

He allowed a short pause. 'I did have someone who cared about me,' he said, his voice abrupt but not forceful, as though he'd surprised himself. 'It wasn't some great _love_ or anything. But I think maybe for a few months, when we were teenagers, he might have cared about me like that.'

'A boy?'

'A boy.' Toshiya smiled, twining his own fingers through his damp hair dreamily. 'We were at school together. I never felt that way about him, but I could tell that he cared about me.' He paused, as though deliberating, 'Once I let him kiss me. It scared him, I think. I don't think he realised how fucking grateful I was for how he felt. I think if he'd have known, he would have asked me for more, and I would've given it to him.'

He caught the expression on Die's face and laughed. 'I'm not _squeamish_ about this stuff, you know. I mean, it was the sixties, right? Free love. Flower power.' He flashed a peace sign. 'Peace.'

Die realised he was staring, and shook his head slowly.

'I think you're weirder than I ever noticed.'

'Well.' Toshiya shrugged. 'We didn't really hang out that much, I guess. You were always...'

'With Aoi. Yeah.'

'And Uruha.'

'Yeah.'

Die looked down at his hands. 'Yeah.'

 

When Aoi had finally come into the room, Die had closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. He had gone for his cold shower; he lay in the dark with his hair dampening the pillow and his body shivering on top of the sheets, the smoke from his last cigarette still hazy on the air. When Aoi had opened the door he'd let a sudden flare of light in from the hallway, but Die's act must have been convincing enough because he heard his roommate curse softly and shut the door with a quiet snap, plunging the two of them back into darkness again.

There was quiet, and then some soft shuffling noises. He heard Aoi stripping off his day clothes and putting on pyjamas, the rustle of fabric a comforting sort of noise in the stillness of the night. There was the sound of his bare feet padding back and forth over the floor, and Die had the strange impression of a cool, luminous gaze raking over him, starting at his head and sweeping all along the tightly curled line of his body.

A blanket was dumped heavily over his back and he blinked, startled. He thought he might have sensed Aoi standing in front of him, but it was impossible to tell. He had the strange urge to stretch out his hand and feel for him, but just as it was growing almost impossible to resist, he heard the sound of Aoi's mattress squeaking; he had obviously thrown himself down upon his own bed.

A pause. More rustling as he drew the covers over himself. Silence then, for a long time. Die dared to open his eyes and as they adjusted to the darkness he started to get an impression of Aoi's shape lying in his own bed, his chest rising and falling with his soft breaths.

'Hey slim,' Aoi whispered after a long while, 'You asleep?'

Die shut his eyes again, tried to make his breaths as slow and even as possible, and after a moment he heard Aoi sigh. There was more rustling, some fidgeting sorts of sounds. Aoi gave another sigh, longer and softer this time, and Die's mouth went dry. His skin prickled.

You had to be fucking kidding.

He was pretty quiet about it, at least. The only sounds were his soft, quick breaths and the skin-over-skin sound as he touched himself, the shushing noise of the bedsheets that made Die think he was doing it under the covers. He didn't even get louder towards the end: his breaths simply got tighter, more restricted, as if they were catching in his throat, and there was the sound of him working himself harder and faster and then slowing abruptly, giving a hitching little gasp; he stroked himself languidly as he came, easing his way through it. The trapped breath escaped him like a long sigh.

Silence.

Die squeezed his eyes tighter shut.

Oh, you just had to be fucking kidding.

 


	6. Chapter 6

_As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent_ , Bowie sang, _you asked for the latest party..._

Toshiya tilted his head over the back of the sofa; he was drunk and he _loved_ being drunk, the sort of numbness in his fingers and the underwater feeling inside his head. The evening had grown darker and the rain had kept on clattering down and Die had a cupboard full of booze, some of it not even _open_ ; Toshiya had never known anybody with that much self-restraint.

'I love this album,' Die said, and was he slurring? He might have been. He was flushed, too, a little, just around his neck and cheeks, and he had abandoned his clipped, abbreviated adult smile for the full-force, thousand-watt mega-grin that Toshiya remembered from his youth: when he smiled like that, he was more inclined to laugh, to let his head fall back, and when he laughed the accumulated years fell away from him and he might have been twenty-three again, his knees spread boyishly wide and his long body falling into tipsy, unstructured lines.

'Come out of the garden,' Toshiya sang idly.

'You'll catch your death in the fog...'

Die's voice was soft but stuck to the tune, whereas Toshiya's voice tended to wander away from it a bit, lapsing into a gentle croak at the end. They smiled at each other.

'It's gone midnight.'

'Yeah.' Toshiya stretched, his arms looking pale and skinny where they protruded from the sleeves of Die's borrowed T-shirt. 'Want me to go?'

Die gave a rude snort. 'As if.' He met Toshiya's eye, his expression very deliberately casual, 'Where do you, uh, live, anyway?'

Toshiya shrugged. 'Oh, you know.'

'Well, I don't, actually. That's why I'm asking.'

'Die,' Toshiya said kindly.

There was a pause in which Die's eyes stayed locked just a little south of Toshiya's own gaze. When they were quiet, the rain outside sounded louder than ever, and Toshiya watched the thoughts crossing behind Die's eyes, clear as clouds scudding across a bright blue sky: wondering what Toshiya did on nights like this, wondering where he sheltered, and if he was safe there.

Blah, blah, blah. _Diamond Dogs_ wound itself up with a lucid little guitar riff. He watched Die connect dots and think about what Toshiya could possibly do to earn his money, and Toshiya felt like he could _hate_ this about people sometimes: how easy they were to disappoint, how deeply their faces could fall.

In the next moment he thought he could love them for how high they built their expectations to begin with, how stubbornly and stupidly _hopeful_ they were, and Bowie sang in ashy tones _it's safe in the city to love in a doorway_ and Toshiya snorted a laugh.

'Toshiya,' Die started awkwardly, but Toshiya cut him off with a smile.

'Don't,' he said gently. 'It's really all right, you know.'

'You'll stay here tonight, though,' Die said, his voice slightly strained, 'Won't you?'

'If I'm invited.'

'It's only a one-bedroom, but...'

'I don't mind sharing.'

Die coloured. 'I was gonna say I'd take the sofa.'

It had been on the tip of Toshiya's tongue to say that Die looked lonely, but he bit it back and just smiled instead, which seemed to make Die even more flustered. He was looking down at his empty glass, fidgeting uncomfortably; finally he muttered something that was lost to the sound of the rain and Bowie crooning _boys, boys, it's a sweet thing_ , and Toshiya leant forward.

'Huh?'

'I said,' Die said forcibly, the tips of his ears burning red, 'That you don't have to do that.'

'Do what?'

If it was possible, Die grew redder.

'I'm not looking to be... _thanked_ ,' he said stiffly.

Oh. _Oh_. Toshiya grinned awkwardly down at his own lap. The look of his body dressed up in Die's clothes was just slightly foreign to him, like something slipping out of focus. He had a dozen responses ready: that Die couldn't afford him, which was patently not true; that he didn't actually _screw_ , handjobs and blowjobs only, quick and impersonal, as if that was a point of virtue that Die would feel reassured by; to joke that he was actually pretty good at it for a straight boy, that he'd be on the sofa in case Die changed his mind, to try and smother the painfulness of the moment in black humour; to stutter and protest that that hadn't been what he'd meant, as if that would convince anyone of anything. Boys, boys, it's a sweet thing, sweet thing.

'It's not that,' he said at last, hugging onto himself tightly. 'I just like waking up next to people; that's all.' He shrugged. 'Always have.'

Die was quiet for a moment, his whole face flushed.

'That was Aoi, too.'

'Yeah?'

'Yeah.'

'He always seemed so...prickly. Uruha too.' He wound his hair around his fingers. 'I guess you have a type.'

Die smiled faintly. 'Maybe. They were. But still.'

They were.

But still.

 

Die woke up that first morning in a tense, aching knot. His head throbbed and his eyes felt dry and sticky and his limbs were heavy as lead, improbably tangled, his hair wrapped around his throat as though it would choke him.

It amazed him, sometimes, exactly how much on your body could hurt. Teeth could ache and stomachs could twist and muscles could cramp and every nerve was expressly designed to report back on all that _pain_ , shooting and throbbing and sinking, a thousand and one ways to hurt. It tired him out.

He heaved himself off the pillow, his head swimming dizzily. The mattress sagged beneath him. The room was still. He'd imagined a moment of sleepy delusion where he'd thought himself at home, but from the second his eyes had cracked open he'd known exactly where he was.

Short-sightedly he squinted across the room: Aoi's bed was a mess of white sheets but he could make out a tangle of dark hair against the pillow. He felt about for his glasses and pushed them a little awkwardly onto his face.

It was weird, waking up and having somebody else _there_. He'd never shared a bedroom with anybody before.

Aoi slept fiercely. His hands made fists that went white at the knuckles with the intensity with which he gripped the blanket up around his shoulders; his form was spiky beneath the sheets, a collection of offended-looking angles. His dark hair was wildly rumpled, as though he had tossed and turned; against the whiteness of the sheets his skin seemed flushed and vividly alive.

It was early still, Die realised. There was no sound from the corridor and the light filtering in through the gauzy curtains was greyish and not yet warm: outside there was birdsong, startlingly loud, and a mist still clung to the peaks surrounding them and curled lazily over the ground. He knew without having to feel it that the morning air would have a dampness to it; that if he went outside now and walked around his bare feet would grow numb and dew would collect and soak up through the thin fabric of his pyjama pants. Back home the sea would be glittering like broken glass and even with the windows shut the air would smell of salt, stinging and heavy. Here it didn't smell of the outside at all: just floor polish, disinfectant, and sleep. Indoor smells. Asylum smells.

 

Aoi stirred. He made a soft sighing noise that was a distant relative of the breathy sounds he'd made the night before; instantly Die felt a sort of squirming embarrassment in the pit of his stomach, the kind of embarrassment that made him want to squeeze his hands into fists and grit his teeth. How was he supposed to look his roommate in the eye, after hearing that? He could barely look at him now. Aoi's exposed neck seemed somehow lurid, the pulse beating there sleazily, a peek into a shocking intimacy. Die sighed, raking his hands through his own hair a little agitatedly.

If this was a normal day and he had woken up at home, he would be trying it himself right now. His bedroom door would be shut and the curtains would be closed and he would be trying to force his mind to go where it was supposed to, his eyes shut or else staring up at the ceiling, hand pushed awkwardly down inside his clothes. How long would it take him to give up? It changed day by day. When he finally did it would be pointless trying to go back to sleep. He'd get out of bed and go for a run in the early morning quiet. He'd listen to his breaths and think about the parts of his body that still worked, and when he finally got home and he'd shower in the dark, and then he'd put on a Doors record and try not to think about how Jim Morrison never had this problem.

Carefully Die lay back down and just lightly touched the skin on his lower belly. It felt drum-tight. He pushed his fingers an inch or so lower, and then pulled his hand back, flushing stupidly.

He couldn't. Not with another person _right there_. He was pretty sure that the only thing more embarrassing than being caught doing it was being caught _not being able_ to do it, and even more embarrassing than just that would be getting caught by _Aoi_ of all people.

He hadn't had an erection in forty-two days.

 

There didn't seem to be anything else to do but lie there and watch his roommate breathe, which made him uncomfortable, and so Die got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. With a clumsy hand he wrote his name down on the sheet stuck to the door, and the time, which the ward clock told him was twenty to six. The bathroom was entirely deserted, and he brushed his teeth without looking in the mirror and closed his eyes to get undressed. In the shower cubicle, he stood beneath the rush of warm water and kept his eyes fixed on the locked door whilst his hand busied itself between his thighs: he thought of his ex-girlfriend, the soft pale skin of her belly which Die had kissed, nuzzling his cheek against her; he thought of her little breasts rising as she breathed and the way they had felt beneath his hands. He thought of the dark shadow between her legs, how he'd been there with his fingers and how he'd even been invited inside, a few times; how it had felt, being completely sheathed inside another person.

Sort of half-heartedly, his cock stirred. It was almost half-hard when the thudding in his chest and the racing in his veins suddenly slackened off, and he tipped his head back against the bathroom tile.

 _Shit_.

He scrubbed his body without looking at it and cranked the water off. It was a relief to stuff his damp limbs back into clothing.

 

He emerged to a ward that was showing signs of life. The clock read just past six and there was tinny music spilling from beneath the door to Kai's dorm, and a nurse was sitting at the desk at the nurses' station doling out dosages of various medicines; she gave him a sunny smile.

'You're up early. Did you sleep well?'

'Oh...yeah, great. Thank you.'

His mind wandered back to Aoi, the sounds he'd made in the dark, and he glanced down at the floor so she wouldn't notice how his face flushed. His hands felt like they wanted to shake, so he jammed them in his pockets. He wished somebody else was awake; somebody...not a nurse.

When he risked looking at her again, there was something sympathetic in her face. Her smile went softer.

'What would you normally be doing?' she asked him in a soothing sort of voice, 'If you were at home?'

'I'd go for a run.'

A muscle tightened below her eyes. 'Ah. I'm afraid...maybe when you've been on the ward a little longer. We tend to want to...what else did you do to pass the time, at home?'

Die shrugged limply. 'Play guitar.'

In the recent weeks it had been the only thing, apart from exercise, that had been able to hold his interest. The television had seemed stupid and empty and the words of books had jumbled themselves up on the pages.

'Well, then.' She got neatly to her feet, pressing down the lines of her already pristine uniform. With precise fingers she produced a set of keys. 'As long as it's not too loud, mind. Breakfast isn't until eight, and most of the men will still be trying to sleep.'

'I can play?'

'As long as I can see you, yes.'

'I'm not going to strangle myself.'

She didn't falter. 'Well, it's policy.'

Still: the high, arched windows of the music room; the unlocking of the cage; the feeling of the guitar in his hands. These were not small things.

He settled himself in an armchair, not on the seat but perched on the arm, which felt easier; he settled the instrument into his lap and played through the strings, one by one.

His fingers seemed to itch, and he breathed out slowly. First things first: the instrument in his lap was nowhere near in tune. It took him a good fifteen minutes of self-consciously singing the notes and twisting the tuning pegs before it would make a good sound, and then he ran through the chords, enjoying the feel of them on his fingertips. The chords stood out in his wrist, his body seemed to sag into a more comfortable shape; the music found its way into him without him having to search for it and it spilled out practised and fluid and clear, and he filled in the words in his head until he realised that there was nobody but the nurse around to hear, and even she was back at the desk and concentrating on her dosages again, her face closed off.

'The time to hesitate is through,' he sang as quietly as he could, the words all but lost under his breath, 'No time to wallow in the mire...'

The foreign words were soothing. He liked the way they didn't have any meaning except what they sounded like; a _true_ meaning, truer than true, pure like boiled water, distilled like a tincture.

'Come on baby, light my fire,

Come on baby, light my fire,

Try to set the night on—'

'Can you play The Beatles?' a rude voice interrupted, and Die's fingers slipped discordantly over the strings as he jumped.

'Jesus,' he muttered. 'You almost gave me a heart attack.'

'Can you?'

In the doorway, Uruha stood very rigidly. He was neatly washed, dressed and brushed, and even from where he stood he gave off the smells of soap and toothpaste; the illusion was almost perfect but for his hands, which tapped agitatedly at the door frame. Each and every one of his fingertips was wrapped in sticking plaster, and when he saw Die looking he scowled and stuck his fists crossly behind his back.

'What song?' Die asked warily.

Uruha fidgeted.

' _I'm So Tired_ ,' he said finally, his voice quiet and tense. 'You know it?'

Die smiled, which felt safe only because Uruha wasn't looking at him. 'Yeah, I know it.'

 

Uruha shifted. He made a flinching sort of motion that might have been a nod. He didn't seem to want to come further into the room. As Die watched, he brought one of his hands out from behind his back and started to bite at the plaster covering his fingers, his eyes downcast; there was a tension to the muscles in his jaw as his teeth worked, pulling and ripping; he looked tired and sad and sort of angry, although whether with Die or with himself, Die couldn't tell. He placed his fingers on the strings.

'I'm so tired...' he sang hesitantly, strumming along with himself; he flinched at a wrong note. 'No, sorry – it's – I'm so tired...'

'I haven't slept a wink,' Uruha mumbled more than sang.

'I wonder should I get up...'

'And fix myself a drink...'

Die was looking up as he played this time; looking at him. Uruha still hadn't lifted his eyes and he was standing completely still. He didn't react as Kai drifted out of the dimness of the hallway like a happy ghost, sticking his head and shoulders around the door and hesitating a moment, shy, before sidling on in. He sat down on the floor at Die's feet, hugging his knees to his chest in a pleased sort of way.

And they must have made a bizarre picture, the three of them – Die perched on the armchair and Kai beaming up at him and Uruha stiff and cross by the door – but it didn't feel bad. The first rays of morning sunshine were starting to slant into the room, throwing gold across Uruha's face and making him blink; when he'd played through _I'm So Tired_ Die adjusted his grip on the guitar and started in on _I Will_ , and then Kai requested _Yellow Submarine_ , which Die chased with _Good Day Sunshine_ before Uruha, still in those stilted tones, asked for _Dear Prudence_.

He stopped after that, flexing his fingers, because Aoi had appeared behind Uruha in the corridor. As Die watched he slipped past him, trailing a light hand over his waist; he moved gracefully, the bars sliding shadows over his shoulders and chest and legs.

'So this is where everyone is,' he said, and his voice was just a little husky from sleep. 'Morning, slim. Do you take requests?'

'He does,' Kai said eagerly.

Funny: Aoi didn't even look at Kai when he spoke. He just nodded, his eyes locked on Die's face.

'Can I have next pick?'

His eyes in the morning light were glowing, nowhere near as dark as they'd first appeared. He didn't look tired at all, Die thought: as if to deny it Aoi stretched hugely, reaching right up with his slender arms. The hem of his T-shirt rode up to expose a smoothly curving waist, a flat belly, the very top of the dip between his hipbones, just a soft shadow.

Die's hands went still.

He swallowed and clicked in his ears.

Just briefly, just for a moment, his cock had sort of – sort of _stirred_. He didn't dare look down to check but he thought he could even _feel_ it, pressing up against the bottom of the guitar.

Dazed, he glanced up, and found Aoi grinning at him in amusement.

'Sure,' he said quickly, fumblingly. 'Yeah, you can have next pick. Whatever.'

 

He made a bed up for Toshiya on the sofa. He felt loose-limbed from tiredness, as though his whole body was floating apart; still, lying in the darkness in his own bed, he knew he was going to struggle to sleep. His mouth tasted like toothpaste and through that, of sake. Every time he closed his eyes, his head reeled.

He had played Aoi the song he'd wanted. He'd kept up his jukebox act until breakfast. He'd kept his eyes and his mind off his roommate entirely, feeling sick in a way that had nothing to do with the food.

In a single dark corner of himself, he'd been relieved. That was something for him, tucked away amongst the panic. Something to be guarded.

Die stared up at his bedroom ceiling. The loudest sound in his room was made by the Aoi of almost a decade ago, leaning forward on his elbows as he cracked up laughing over some dirty joke.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who is following and reading this story! I'm sorry updates are gonna get a bit slack. My wedding is May 15th, which is now looking awful close. Sorry!


	7. Chapter 7

The next morning, Toshiya had gone.

Die had hardly expected anything else.

He hadn't left a note; of course, that wasn't his style. The blanket had been neatly folded and any indentations left by his body had been neatly patted away: better to just fade away, vanish, pretend you were never there. The two glasses they'd been drinking from had been washed and now stood on the draining board, sparkling innocently in the morning light.

It was just a little past eight and the city outside looked blustery and damp and chilly, the buildings sort of huddled into themselves, and Die stood by the window and let his eyes focus near and far, near and far, from the high-rises to the sky to the road to his own milky, murky reflection. It appalled him to see how old he looked.

What the hell had he been thinking, anyway? Toshiya might have been a near complete fuck-up but at least he knew himself; at least he knew what he could take, how much he could withstand. Die didn't have a clue, clearly.

He remembered how back then – back at the sanatorium – Toshiya had seemed so kind, so high-functioning, so – _normal_. The bruises tucked away like secrets inside the crooks of his elbows had never amounted to much in Die's mind, somehow: he had simply been another person who had ended up being so much greater than the sum of his problems; a sweet person, a nice person, a friend. Like all of them he had held a mystery at his core, and it was only now that Die was an adult that the mystery was so plainly and so uglily laid bare: that myth, that secret, Toshiya's great and private self – a handful of scattered pharmaceuticals. A needle, a tourniquet, and the damage underneath.

And that was all, and he knew it. And yet one tiny glimpse of the past had been all it had taken for Die to somehow imagine that they could start again; that he could be twenty-two again; to believe that he could travel back so seamlessly.

Idiot.

As if he was man enough, as if he was _anything_ enough, to survive Aoi twice.

 

That first full day in the sanatorium, he'd found himself avoiding him.

The – thing – that had happened in the morning – well, okay, there was probably an explanation for it. Some sort of latent reaction to his attempts at getting himself going in the shower; some kind of nervous response. These things didn't have to mean anything. When he'd been younger – when he'd been different – there had been some days where it seemed almost anything could set it off. So there was nothing to worry about.

Still. It was so rare that his body matched up to his mind but now they both felt uncomfortably present and sensitive; _vulnerable_ even, like something stretched out on a rack. There was something growing down in his lower abdomen that felt indecently open, like a wound: something visceral, with edges that he could palpate and test the fleshiness of, the rawness of, the painfulness of.

It occurred to him that he perhaps hadn't really believed that his parents could leave him here.

His breakfast made him sick.

He wanted to shut himself away behind a closed door, but Aoi had taken up residence in their shared bedroom: he was sitting up on his bed in a meerkat posture, very perky and bright-looking; he had a tight-shouldered Uruha tucked in between his knees and he was, to Die's slight unease, brushing the other man's hair.

So Die gave up on that. He found himself instead sitting uncomfortably in the music room, his feet on the seat before him and his knees clamped tight to his chest. He put his Buddy Holly LP on the player because it was already in the room. He didn't want to go and face Aoi and Uruha and whatever weird beauty parlour they were hosting, just to get another record out.

Anyway, there was something about Buddy Holly that always made him feel sort of better, somehow. He was aware that Buddy wasn't considered as cool as maybe The Doors or The Beach Boys were, but he also secretly suspected that all of that was shit, and that Buddy Holly was too cool for most people to know how cool he actually was. Or something.

The music drew in Kai, accompanied at a reluctant sort of distance by a boy Die had seen but hadn't really met yet; they exchanged slight nods whilst Kai swayed dreamily over by the window, and when _Everyday_ finished and the record started hissing to be turned over to its B side, the unfamiliar boy sort of quirked his eyebrows up and leant forward in his armchair.

'Hi. Kosuke.'

Die eyed him a little warily. 'Die. Hi.'

'You're Aoi's new roommate, huh.'

'That's right. And you're Kai's?'

'Yeah. Hm.'

He leant back in his chair. He had an odd, hunched sort of posture, Die thought, almost like an owl: he had a sharp kind of nose too, like a beak, and a pair of eyes to match. He didn't seem to need to blink as much as normal people. 'Were you a voluntary?'

'Huh?'

'You signed yourself in? Committed yourself, I mean?'

'Oh. Yeah.'

Die's palms were itching; they were sweating. He clamped them between his knees miserably. The boy – Kosuke – did a shruggy, hawkish sort of nod.

'Thought so. Me too. Only the really crazy ones get forced to be here.'

'Right.'

There was an uncomfortable pause, during which Die flipped the record over. He took his time, holding the vinyl by its very edges and taking some comfort from the feeling of it between his palms. When he lowered the needle, he did it with an absolute gentleness.

'Where's Aoi?' Kai asked, twirling idly by the window, and Die gave a shrug that was more of a flinch.

'Our room.'

'Oh. Where's Uruha?'

'Same place.'

'Oh.'

Smiling, Kai wound a lock of hair around his finger. Die watched him a moment longer, but it seemed he didn't have anything more to say.

'Hey.'

A little uncertainly, Die turned his attention back to Kosuke: the other man had leant forward again, his fingers clamped tightly around the arms of his chair.

'What?'

He looked almost nervous, Die thought. His eyes kept darting between Die and the doorway.

'Look,' he said in a low voice, 'Just be careful, won't you?'

'Be careful,' Die repeated blankly.

'With _Aoi_.' He widened his eyes meaningfully: it made him look more like an owl than ever.

'Okay,' Die said cautiously.

'It's just—' he hunched forward even further, his fingertips digging so hard into the chair's upholstery that they went white, his words suddenly coming out very low and fast, 'I don't know if anybody warned you about him. I don't know but I bet they didn't. You need to be careful around him; don't let him watch you get changed or anything like that, don't let him get into bed with you, I don't know what but he didn't something with Uruha and it made him—'

' _Hold me close_ ,' Kai sang out suddenly, a blissfully off-key warble, 'a _nd tell me how you feel.._.'

Die's whole body felt sort of stiff, but his face most of all. It seemed it had been frozen. In front of him, Kosuke sat back and crossed his arms tightly across his chest, scowling darkly.

' _Tell me love is real, mm-mm_ - _mmmm_...I love this song. I love this one. I—'

'Yes,' Kosuke interrupted irritably, 'We get it, Kai. You love it.'

Kai sighed, the sound soft and dreamy. 'I _love_ it,' he repeated with satisfaction. 'I want to see him _live_.'

Kosuke sent Die a pointed sort of look, and Die lit up a cigarette.

 

Years later and miles away, Die repeated the action, taking a good long lungful of smoke so that his chest seemed to burn from the inside. Kai's lilting melody seemed to be stuck in his head, turning around and around: sad little songbird. His eyes prickled, and he blinked tightly.

He hadn't played dumb, back then. Even without Kosuke's hard-faced warnings he would have known what Aoi was: he wasn't quite as naïve as he may have looked and Aoi certainly wasn't much of a fucking actor. The discomfort – 'discomfort', all right, the _fear_ – came from the darkly hinted-at possibility of him _doing something_ , something more than when Die's faint and fast-breathing music teacher had placed a sweaty hand on his knee, a hand that had never returned once it had been hastily pushed away: something _else_. Something to make Uruha, something to make Uruha...what.

He had walked through the corridors but there was nowhere to walk to. He had left Buddy Holly spinning and sat in the television room, where the only other person was the stony-faced man who had sat by Shinya at dinner the night before, and nothing social was expected of Die at all. In times of panic he was gifted at this: at letting go, at allowing himself to drift away from his body. At floating.

And weirdly, it felt sort of like being at home. It felt like coming home unannounced in the middle of the semester and not being able to speak, and his parents hovering like worried curtains around the edge of some wide bright horror: it felt like lying limp on his back on his bed and letting the huge weight of what had happened crush him flat. It felt better, being flat. It felt safer.

But in the end, it hadn't protected him. And now he was here.

 

Struggling weakly against the cushions, he pushed himself upright. Over in the corner, Shinya's expressionless minder hadn't so much as looked up; he was sitting with a collapsed sort of posture by a very careworn looking bookshelf, steadily reading his way through a tattered paperback.

With light, almost casual movements Die got up off the sofa. It was very, very important to control your movement at times like these: one little slip – a clenching and unclenching of the fists, a light-headed tottering, an almost imperceptible quickening of the step – could give you away. He forced himself to walk slowly, sedately. He kept his eyes fixed on the blankness in front of him: the corridor, floors and walls and ceiling, all shiny white. In his head he ticked off a dim register of its features: phone booths, dorm rooms, light fixtures. He printed his name carefully on the bathroom sign-in sheet and slipped in where he could camouflage himself, pale and cold and brittle, amongst the tiles. Like a chameleon, he became them. He closed the door of the cubicle behind him and the loud part of his mind seemed to waver out of focus like a radio that was wandering out of range. As if before an emperor, he got down on his knees. He took a deep breath and caught the scent of bleach and, beneath it, of urine. He clutched his hair back behind his shoulders grimly.

And it was _difficult_ ; that was what nobody ever appreciated, how much hard _work_ it was, to kneel on the hard tile and to lean and heave and retch and feel the stinging in his throat and nose and eyes, the rawness and foulness of his mouth, the slippery-bitter taste of bile and the metallic flavour of his own saliva; the sourness of enzymes with nothing to digest. It was so hard. It was so much work he felt like he could just lay down and die.

Pause. Breath. He gasped and rested his sweating forehead against the toilet seat as he groped for the flush. The rushing noise sounded faint to his ears, and when he looked up at his hand on top of the cistern it made him so sad he thought for a dangerous moment that he was about to start crying; it was so thin and pale and distant, like something from another planet, like something carved from ice.

'Die?'

His hands slipped greasily on the walls as he stumbled to right himself. All that came out when he opened his mouth was a cough.

'Die, you have to go for therapy.'

The ceiling lights seemed to be flashing behind his eyes. Grimacing, he pulled back the deadbolt on the cubicle door.

'Kai?'

'Hi, Die. You have to go for therapy now.'

'I need to...' he scrubbed his wrist over his forehead agitatedly, making his way over to the sinks. With shaking hands he loaded up a brush with toothpaste and started jamming it around inside his mouth.

'Aoi said you'd probably be making yourself puke,' Kai said conversationally, his bright eyes on Die's pale reflection. 'But you have to go to therapy anyway.'

Shivering, Die spat a mouthful of froth into the sink and carried on scrubbing.

'Don't you want to know which doctor you get?' Kai asked, swinging back and forth like a child. 'I've got Kimura but not everybody does, Kosuke has Fukui and Uruha has Kimura too and Aoi has Sato—'

'I don't care,' Die said roughly, though Kai just bounced on the balls of his feet, looking unperturbed.

'Aoi wants to know,' he said, his gaze now on the ceiling. 'He's curious.'

'Oh yeah?' Die said savagely. 'Well you can tell Aoi, from me, to mind his own business.'

'But he—'

'He's a fag,' Die snapped, the words seeming to crack in the fragile air like a whip. Kai stopped bouncing and started anxiously pinching his lower lip into pleats. Without a smile on his face, he looked very lost and uncertain, and Die gripped the sink tightly.

'Sorry,' he said, and was relieved to hear his voice coming out softly. 'Kai, I didn't—'

But he had gone, the door already swinging shut behind him. Quietly, Die sighed.

His face in the mirror looked like nothing he recognised on this earth, and he fought the urge to kick out at the glass as he exited the bathroom.

 

In the kitchen, Die closed his eyes tight for a full minute before he picked up the telephone handset. He knew the number by heart: he watched his finger pull at the rotary dial. In Mie, the two of them would certainly be up and going about their day by now; it was almost nine, and Shiori generally woke up and started clamouring to be fed around seven or so. Die could hear the little chirping noises that she made, almost as clearly as if she was right next to him. He knew without being there the way she would light up when his wife entered the room, her little arms and legs wheeling happily.

'Yes, hello?'

'Mari. Sweetheart,' Die said a little self-consciously.

'Oh, Die! Good morning.'

'Morning. How is everything?'

'Oh, fine! All fine.'

'The baby?'

'She's fine, Die.' He could hear the smile in her voice. 'Don't you think it would be the first thing I'd scream down the phone at you, if something was wrong with her? No, she's perfect. How's work?'

'Busy. That's sort of why I called. It's looking like I might have to stay here this week.'

'Oh, no,' Mari said, but her voice had a floating sort of lightness that seemed to drift right past him. 'Why's that?'

'Oh, just...a few licensing issues with the new place, a few noise complaints to deal with. That sort of thing.'

She made a soft noise of commiseration, but again, Die thought he could hear her smile. He could hear her very thoughts, almost: _oh, good. Now I can take the baby out to visit my mother, and take her around to my sisters', and maybe go by the office with her to show her off to all the girls still in the secretarial pool. Oh, and once I'm done with all that, maybe I can take her to see Mr Junichiro the art teacher at the adult learning centre, and the three of us can go out in Tsu together and pretend that_ we're _the family, mother and father and baby. It'll be—_

'I'm sorry to leave the two of you alone.'

— _so much fun_.

'I'm lucky to have such an ambitious husband.'

'Work on some good watercolours to show me when I'm back, won't you?'

'Oh, I will. I'm getting better all the time.'

Die smiled. 'I know. You're very talented.'

When they said their goodbyes, he hung up the receiver as delicately as if it had been made of glass.

And then, without giving himself time to think about what he was doing, he took the handset off its hook again and clamped it between his ear and his shoulder so he could reach for the phone book he'd discarded in such a hurry the day before. It took much less time to find, this time: the pages fell open neatly at the Ts and his eyes seemed to fall directly onto to Takashima, U. Twelve of them in total, but there was no need to ring through them all, because what number would Uruha ever be but twelve? His perfect pattern, his obsession; to try any of the others first would have been stupid. The twelfth Takashima, U on the list lived in Meguro and he answered, breathlessly, just before the second ring.

'Yes,' he said, and Die squeezed the receiver so hard that the plastic made a threatening creak beneath his fingers. His vision blurred without warning.

Uruha's voice was brisk, short, almost impatient, and who could ever have imagined how that could hit at you in the chest all together, all at once: the old annoyance and the then the flooding ache of love, spreading out as tenderly as a bruise, like the soreness of a muscle that hasn't been used in a lifetime. There was a soft sound down the line that Die thought might have been caused by a finger absently tapping against the receiver, the noise of it echoing as if underwater, except that it wasn't absent at all because it happened in precise little groups of twelve, dot-dot-dot like Morse code, like a message that only Die could decipher.

'Uruha,' he said, 'It's me.'

The tapping stumbled for just a moment, a longer and harder noise. Dot-dot-dot-dash.

'Die,' he said.

'Hi.'

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back! And happily wedded and honeymooned. It's been such a mad wonderful beautiful few weeks. Thanks so much for waiting, guys!


	8. Chapter 8

Dr Fukui was the tiniest person Die had ever met, and it made him feel gargantuan.

She sat perched on the very edge of a black leather office chair in front of a desk that dwarfed her entirely, and her white coat had the sleeves neatly cuffed so that they wouldn't fall over her hands. Underneath she wore a blouse, very plain but wrinkled and with a bluish spot over the left breast where a pen had obviously leaked when clipped to the front pocket; her hair was held sensibly back from her face with a rubber band, and above her silvery metal spectacles, her eyebrows were starting to grow together over the bridge of her nose.

She didn't bother smiling at Die, but regarded him with an expression of undisguised interest, as if she was planning to sketch him.

'Andou,' she said briskly. 'Dr Fukui. Please.'

She gestured to the chair that sat in front of her desk: no couch, that was a surprise. Die had assumed every therapist's office came with one. He'd envisioned himself lying awkwardly on his back with the sunlight coming in through the barred windows and shredding him to pieces.

A little awkwardly, he sat down and collected in his limbs. As if by accident, just adjusting his pants over his knees, he was able to let some hair slip forth over his shoulders and screen his face from her. Her eyes behind her glasses seemed ultra-focused, capable of boring right into him; in front of her narrow, assessing gaze, he felt bloated and corpulent. It was a small mercy when she at last dropped her small, sharp eyes to the manila folder in front of her.

'University in Tokyo,' she said aloud, apparently reading, although Die wasn't stupid enough to believe even for a second that there was a single word on the page before her that she hadn't memorised. Her eyes flashed up at him. 'But you dropped out.'

'Yeah.'

'Mm. Well, I don't suppose the faculties would have been functioning, as such.'

'Not really.'

'Is that why you left? Because of the riots?'

'There wasn't much point in being there. A lot of people left,' Die said, hearing a slight defensiveness in his voice.

'Of course. The riots were ghastly.' She sat back. 'I imagine the situation on your campus was very stressful.'

'I suppose.'

'Were you involved in the riots, at all?'

Die managed to look her in the eyes. 'No.'

'So. You're studying for a foreign languages degree. You spend two semesters abroad in England, put in all that work, and when the riots start in your final year you decide to give it all up.'

'There...there weren't any classes. The university wasn't _working_ any more; the campus was barricaded. People who tried to go to classes, teachers, they'd...'

'Yes. A very ugly episode. But...' she rested her pointy little elbows on the desk, ' _Just_ an episode. Things are getting back to normal.'

Die shrugged with one shoulder, and she knotted her fingers together. She wore a wedding ring, he couldn't help but notice. Around her bony finger it looked as thick and cumbersome as a shackle. It caught the sunlight that came in through the window.

'The point I'm making, Die, is that you put a lot of work in and then gave up hope awfully fast. Was there something else going on?'

'The police were tear-gassing people. What was I supposed to do?'

She shrugged, imitating him. 'Wait it out? The vast majority did. By and large they're on track to graduate as normal.'

Die's face felt stiff.

'Good for them.'

'So I'm asking, Die. Was there something else going on?'

Was there.

Die turned his head to look out of the window. The sunlight was blinding.

 

What was weird was that he hadn't gone into it – into _any_ of it, not dropping out or coming to the sanatorium or sitting down in therapy – intending to be difficult. He'd imagined that once he was faced with somebody who could help him, whatever terrible knot that had formed inside him would be wrenched free, and everything bad would flow out of him like a river. He'd thought about how incredibly _light_ he would feel with all of it gone; light enough to drift, to float; so light he couldn't believe it.

It was as though he was watching himself from the outside. It was as though his real self was trapped somewhere behind a pane of thick, thick glass, and no matter how he yelled and pounded on it he couldn't seem to make the sad marionette sitting in the armchair hear him; couldn't seem to make it react. As he watched it just sighed, lowered its head, spread its knees boyishly as it slouched down further in its chair. It bit its nails.

'Do you want to get better?' Fukui asked him.

'Yes.'

He felt like yelling it, in case that would make it more convincing.

'Well, that's good. But if you want to get better, first you need to tell me what the problem is.'

'Isn't that...I thought that was...your job, isn't it?'

Surprisingly, she smiled at him. With a ballpoint pen she tapped at the nameplate on her desktop.

'Psychotherapist,' she said, 'Not mind reader.'

'Well – what if I don't know what the problem is?'

'Then we figure it out.'

She shrugged, her pointy shoulders rounding for just a moment, but she was still smiling at him. Her face seemed to say: you know. Of course you know.

 

By the time Die left his apartment that morning it was drizzling, the wind blowing cold little handfuls of rain into his face and eyes, and everybody on the street had a huddled look about them. The station smelled damp and was full of the burdensome press and squeak of raincoats and the jostle of umbrellas; with gritted teeth, Die pushed his way through the jam. The Hibiya line platform was quieter, though, and the sudden absence of pressure made Die feel strangely unsecured, as though he might drift apart. He wished he could speak to somebody; he wished Toshiya hadn't left, although he'd fully expected him to and would have been shocked, actually, if he hadn't.

And what would he even say to him, if he was here? He was never sure, had _never_ been sure, of how much other people – people outside of the three of them, outside of Aoi and Uruha and himself – had known.

In his head Die counted them off, swallowing hard to choke down the names that tried to stick in his throat and hurt: Kai. Kosuke. Shinya. Kyo. Ruki. Toshiya.

He stepped onto the train and grasped onto an overhead strap, his knuckles white with effort. Start where it felt coldest and most splintery inside his chest: Kai, sweet smiling Kai, their Peter Pan who had both known and not known. Or _made_ himself not know.

Kosuke: certainly.

Shinya and Kyo were wildcards, and Ruki: well, Ruki had known something. Perhaps not as much as he'd thought he'd known, but he'd known something.

Inside of his head, Toshiya smiled at him, giving nothing away. Gently the train rocked and Die let his eyes fall closed: slowly, deliberately he tried to summon them, the ghosts of them all around him, the people who had once protected him. He tried to remember the way it had felt to be lying in bed with Aoi on one side and Uruha on the other, their two heads pressed against his shoulders; he tried to remember the way Kai had rocked his body from side to side like a child, the way Ruki's lower back would curve as he lay on the floor and drew, the way Kyo watched him. He tried to remember the way Aoi had smelled, the warmth of his skin; he tried to remember the way Uruha had looked at him, had smiled at him, that first time the three of them had fallen together. That first, surprising time.

The train jolted, and Die's eyes snapped open.

 

Therapy had left him feeling tired.

There was a feeling of incredible pressure inside of his head, as if his mind was pushing outward against his skull; the beginning of a bad headache was beginning to thump queasily in his temples and across the tight-feeling band of his forehead, and he felt faintly sick. The door to his dorm was open just slightly, and through it he caught the low, pleasant hum of Aoi's voice, not quite loud enough for him to make out words. He reached to push it wider open, and Uruha's angry eyes flashed back at his through the crack.

Die let his hand go slack, and wandered back towards the TV room. He didn't really want to hang out with them anyway; after what Kosuke had said, he wasn't even sure about hanging out with Aoi on his own.

It felt weird, almost sort of hot inside his chest and throat, because when he'd met Aoi he'd felt so relieved. He'd felt so sure, straight away, that he wanted to be his friend.

He found Kai's strange, intense roommate sitting on the sofa and staring hard at the television set, which was showing butterflies migrating through so much static that they might have been fluttering through a blizzard. Kosuke gave him a quick nod of recognition, shifting with a sharp, brief movement down the cushion.

'Hi. Sit if you like.'

Mechanically, he did.

'Hi.'

Squinting at the screen made his head feel worse; he directed his gaze at the floor instead. In front of his eyes it swayed unsteadily, and he forced himself to swallow down a mouthful of thin saliva. It tasted like metal.

'You have a TV at home?' Kosuke asked, his voice so clipped that he almost seemed to be biting at his own words.

'Yeah.'

'Colour, or black and white?'

'Colour.' Die closed his eyes, willing his head to stop pounding. 'I don't like it.'

'Yeah?'

Yes. All the people in the Technicolor movies and television shows looked realer-than-real in a way that made Die's headache surge harder against the backs of his eyes, their skins flushed and fleshy and pink as a baby's and their clothes jarringly colour-blocked and miles and miles of very blue ocean or very green fields rolling away from them in every direction.

But it was too much effort to say it. He rubbed at his forehead hard.

'Did you have therapy?'

'Mm.'

'Who'd you get?'

'Doctor Fukui.'

'Did you tell her?'

Die squeezed his eyes tightly shut, knuckling at their closed lids. 'Tell her what?' he asked through gritted teeth.

'About your roommate problem.'

He heard the snap of a lighter, and in a second or so the smell of burning wound its way around him. 'You don't have to just put up with it, you know. This is an expensive place.'

Die opened his eyes to see Kosuke attempting to blow a smoke ring, but it drifted into wisps in the still air.

'So?'

'So we're paying them. _They_ work for _us_.'

'I don't know if—'

'Uruha did. He told his father.'

'What did Aoi – what's he supposed to have even done?'

Kosuke eyed him significantly, and threw him a cigarette. ' _Something_ ,' he said darkly. 'I wasn't here then, but some people were. Shinya and Kyo and Kai. You can ask any of them, but they're all crazy. Kyo doesn't talk and Shinya and Kai don't understand things right.'

'So why are you telling me this?' Die asked, the aggression in his voice surprising even him. A sharp pain needled at his skull and he pictured the bone fracturing, a clear fluid leaking beneath his skin. Kosuke's eyes narrowed, but his only response to Die's hostile tone was a jagged shrug.

'I had a friend here,' he said a little abruptly, 'Before you. Masaru. They wanted to put _me_ in Aoi's room, but Masaru warned me, and my parents complained, so I got Kai instead. He's a dud, but he's _safe_.' He shrugged again, lopsidedly; a _your funeral_ kind of shrug. 'I believe in karma. I think things come to get you. I wanted to pass it on. I'm glad Masaru told me.'

He took a deep drag on his cigarette. 'Imagine ending up like Uruha.'

They sat quietly for a few minutes, Kosuke smoking and Die turning the cigarette he'd been given over and over between his fingers. He wanted it, but it seemed very important to wait. To resist.

'Masaru knew,' Kosuke said finally, 'Because he used to have to be in the room with Aoi. _He_ said...' he twisted hastily, looking all around him before leaning in towards Die confidingly, 'That Aoi offered to—' he made a hasty gesture, his eyes wide, ' _You_ know. Use his mouth on him.'

Instantly, Die directed his gaze downwards. His hands looked like nothing, the bones like twigs, so loosely knotted together. The skin looked thin and pale, blotching red: he felt warm. There was a humid heat rising from around his neck that made him feel sweaty and uncomfortable, like his clothes were sticking to him, like insects were crawling on him: he could see Aoi's eyes, his laughing eyes, and he shifted where he sat.

'That's gross,' he said quietly.

'Yeah.'

Die gave in and lit up the cigarette Kosuke had given them, and for a few moments they smoked in silence, filling the air around them with fog. Outside of the window a bird was singing with a jarring three-note sound, repeating over and over into the silence. The sunlight illuminated the dust motes held captive in the motionless air.

'The worst thing,' Kosuke said finally, 'Is the way Uruha clings to him now. I'd rather be dead than be like that.'

He let the smoke furl from his nostrils, frowning over at the window. 'Uruha's father should have sued.'

 

The address he'd been given was a good ten-minute walk away from Meguro station, through some narrow, peaceful-looking back streets that wriggled around towards the canal. It was greener here than where Die lived, and the power lines that bisected the thin view of grey sky between the rooftops were lined with swallows making chirpy, gossipy sounds to each other. At this time of day, the majority of the people out on the street were mothers with young children, the women holding up umbrellas and the children decked out entirely in wellington boots and slippery rain jackets in primary colours. He passed a whole troupe of them on the bridge that crossed over the wide, flat canal, watching the one bedraggled duck that paddled against the current. The water was grey-green, like old metal. Its surface was peppered with raindrops.

Uruha lived in a small but free-standing house directly by the canalside, close enough to smell the metallic scent of the water but tucked away behind a clipped leylandii hedge that was high enough to obscure any possible view of it, even from the second floor windows. The wooden gate that led into the property was meticulously maintained, but stepping beyond it gave an immediate impression of being plunged into dark, cold water: the greenery blocked out a good deal of light and rain had collected slickly on the cobbled pathway that led to the front door, so Die was splashing through puddles. The hedges shut out a lot of the noise, as well as the light. There was an odd feeling of pressure, like his ears were popping.

He felt, unexpectedly, very calm. The fear that had threatened to paralyse him back in Roppongi had withdrawn to somewhere deep and secret inside of him, curled up like a woodlouse, and around that tiny frightened centre his body had become a steady, serene vessel: his heart beating smoothly within his chest, his breathing slow and measured, his footsteps careful and precise. When he reached up for the wooden knocker on the front door, his hand shook only slightly. He wondered suddenly if he was going to throw up, and then the door was wrenched open before he could so much as touch it.

His first impression was one of great darkness. There was a pair of wide, achingly familiar eyes staring out at him from the gloom, and that clear gaze met Die's own just for a moment before Uruha whirled around, retreated, draping his body in the shadows of his home. He might have vanished entirely if it weren't for the sound of his soft footsteps, leading away over wooden floors, and silently Die stepped into the house and closed the front door behind him. When he did so, the darkness was as complete as if somebody had suddenly stuffed him into a deep black sack.

'Uruha?'

'I hate when people knock on the door.' Uruha's voice came from startlingly close by, speaking quietly and furtively, as though people might be listening in.

'It's so _dark_ —'

'Come on. You have to leave by six o'clock.'

Tentatively, Die felt his way forward. He found a wall and half-groped his way along it, feeling almost as stupid as he was confused; why the fuck was it so _dark_? Semi-formed possibilities formed and dissolved quickly in his mind: power cuts, electricity bills. As his eyes started to adjust to the gloom he gauged that he was in a narrow and rather low-ceilinged hallway that led to the shadowy outline of a staircase; he thought that was where they were headed until a hand came out of nowhere and grasped his wrist, tugging him around a corner that he hadn't realised was there. There was the click of a door catch, and then he was blinking in a sudden flood of light, his eyes stinging. Uruha closed the door behind them, and shut the darkness back into the hallway.

Die rubbed his eyes once, harshly, and then raked his damp hair back out of his face.

They were standing, the two of them, in what Die figured was Uruha's study. It was a smallish room with a double window situated over a very large and solid-looking wooden desk, upon which was a neatly-ordered set of tiered paper trays and a number of small, delicate instruments that Die guessed were something to do with map-making. A drafting board stood against the opposite corner, where whatever daylight got past the high hedges would fall, and the other walls were dominated by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a large closet. There were two decorations: a framed antique map of the world next to the window, and a slim glass vase on the desk. It was empty.

Against these surroundings, Uruha seemed more sure of himself; or perhaps it was simply that he was in the light now, and Die could see him clearly. He looked thinner, perhaps, than Die remembered him, but not terribly so: he was as neatly dressed and coiffed as ever, and he had a pair of thick-rimmed glasses balanced on his nose. As Die watched, he reached up to adjust them. One, two, three, four times. Twelve times in a row.

 


	9. Chapter 9

That night, Die got ready for bed in the bathroom, locked securely into a cubicle. It was more comfortable like that, anyway. It was better when nobody could see him; it was better if he couldn't see himself. Behind a locked door, he could shut his eyes and not open them until he was safely covered in clothes again.

His mind felt overstuffed and full, the way his stomach did after eating even a few bites, sick and bloated. Resting his hand briefly on his belly, it felt tight as a drum and inside him, his stomach flipped. Brushing his teeth, he gagged repeatedly until he had to stop and lean his forehead against the mirror. When he spat toothpaste into the sink, there was pink blood swirling in with the minty white.

In their shared bedroom Aoi was still lounging about in his day clothes; he was sat up on his bed and slowly, languidly smoking a cigarette, holding his arm out of the open window between puffs so that the room didn't fill up with the smell of it. The night was clear and crisp-feeling, full of the scent of pine; behind the bars Die could see a tiny curl of blue-grey smoke unfurling towards the hard, bright little stars.

He got straight into bed and dragged the covers hastily up over his body, bunching them in tight around his chin. The pillow was cool against his hot, aching head, but his eyes wouldn't shut. No matter how much he urged them, they remained staring stubbornly up at the ceiling, where the patterns that whorled and curved in the plaster blurred short-sightedly out of understanding. In the periphery of his vision he caught Aoi's chest rising and falling as he yawned and then sighed quietly. At length, he stubbed his cigarette out against the side of the building and flung the butt out into the darkness, but he stayed right where he was, his right arm hanging vulnerably out in empty space. He was smiling, Die realised; a small, soft, private sort of smile that made him feel embarrassed to be looking. Almost guiltily, he rolled onto his side so that he was facing the wall.

The time stretched out soundlessly. There was no traffic, no sirens, no wind in the trees. Even the birds seemed to have all gone away, and from the corridor outside the pattering footsteps of patients going back and forth to the bathroom had come to their quiet conclusion. He thought about Uruha lying in bed in his own room and wondered if he was relieved to be there alone, or if he was lying still and silently resenting Die for occupying the bed that used to be his, his jaw and knuckles and eyes all tense with hate.

He stared at the wall and thought about how much time he would have to look at this place. The minutes seemed to stretch out before him endlessly, hours and hours in which there was nothing to do but commit this place to memory: the feeling of the sheets, their crispness, the detergent smell; the colour of the paint on the walls and the texture of it and— there was something scratched into the wall, here. Squinting, Die couldn't quite make it out. Carefully he leaned in, reached out and rubbed his thumb over it: tiny, precise, neat little letters pressed themselves against his skin, writing themselves between the lines of his fingerprint.

 _Help me_.

Die pressed his thumb as hard as he could against it, hard enough for the skin beneath his thumbnail to go white with pressure. He held his breath and counted, and waited, and when he moved his hand the scratched letters were as clear as ever, but they had transferred themselves onto his own skin like a tattoo.

 

Whilst Uruha disappeared back into the darkness to get them drinks, Die sat at his desk.

It was an odd feeling, sitting in the chair where Uruha did his work. The contents of the desk were just so _him_ , laid out so neatly at perfect right-angles to each other, everything a dignified inch apart: appointment book, notebook, clock, telephone. And looking at these somehow sad, calm possessions, Die smoothed and resmoothed his hair, trying to calm his nerves.

It wasn't as though he'd never been anxious before. He'd been _very_ anxious before: coming to the sanatorium; sitting in therapy; the first time Aoi's hand had been allowed to slip lower than it had before. Even more recently, opening up every one of his clubs and then the pacing and waiting for his daughter to be born, and seeing Toshiya's familiar, lanky frame and the slight turn of his head on the train – he could remember, pretty much, the jolt that had gone through him and the sickness and then the feeling like everything was short-circuiting inside his head, but only in the most vague, abstract and academic way. It just didn't seem real, not any more, not even Toshiya. Not like this.

 _Because Uruha means something,_ Die's mind muttered at him nastily.

_Because you'd rather fuck up with a hundred Toshiyas than fuck up this._

_Because Aoi would be so fucking disappointed with you for how you've let Uruha go, wouldn't he?_

Violently, he shook his head until he felt dizzy. When he resumed his hair-smoothing routine, it was just as something to occupy his hands: left to their own devices, he thought they might try to start physically batting the intrusive thoughts away.

He could see out of Uruha's study window. They looked out onto a few feet of rainslick wooden veranda and then those stupid, towering leylandii hedges again, turning all the daylight in the room greenish. Raindrops made a misty patina on the windowpane, and he could see the slight movement of the trees outside in the wind. Stealthily, keeping a guilty eye over his shoulder for Uruha, he leant forward and just shifted the window open a crack.

Sound of the wet city: cars hissing through rain. The quieter ticking sound of it hitting the wooden decking. The _shush, shush_ whispering sounds of the hedges.

He wondered if maybe Uruha was lonely.

On the upper right corner of the desk there was a laminated ID card with a clip on the top: Uruha's picture and his name stamped with a government insignia and the watermark _National Land Agency_. Beneath his name was printed _Geographical Survey Institute_ in both Japanese and English letters. His face in the photograph was perfectly blank and impossible to read, like the image of a long-dead relative that you've never known in real life. It looked professional. He had his hair tied back, his black-framed glasses, a pressed white shirt. He looked anonymous.

This was the man he was so frightened of seeing? _This_ person, this government nerd with the closed-off expression and the quiet, serene little office, nothing out of place – could it really be Uruha, _their_ Uruha? The person they'd once been closer to than anybody else in the world; _that_ Uruha?

Maybe there'd been a mistake. Die rubbed his hands over his face harshly.

Though the real Uruha, when he shouldered his way back into the study with a tray full of clinking glassware, bore almost no relation to his ID card. Oh, he was as neatly dressed and coiffed as ever, but up close he was looking distinctly careworn, as though he hadn't slept or eaten well in quite some time, and unlike the expression of smooth neutrality he wore in the photograph, in real life his face seemed tense and troubled, almost angry. His eyes, when he finally met Die's gaze, were dark and confused-looking, as though he'd just woken up. He perched himself stiffly on the stool by the drafting board in the corner and clamped his hands firmly between his knees.

Incredible, how something so simple could yank at Die's heart so much. So innocuous, that gesture, if you didn't know him; so loaded with meaning if you did.

Squeezing his hands tightly together, clenching them between his knees, so that he couldn't tap or pick or bite at them.

 

On the tray he'd bought in there was a bottle of scotch, which made Die smile – it wasn't even noon yet – and a small jug of water, two cut-crystal glasses and, bafflingly, a sugar bowl and spoon. Uruha gave these objects a nod so tight that it was really more of a twitch, and uncertainly, Die picked up the bottle and poured them both a healthy shot. May as well get the ice melted a bit, here.

'Water?' he offered, perhaps more decorously than he'd ever spoken in his life, and Uruha gave another flinch of a nod. Die added a half inch or so to each of their drinks; the scotch looked like good stuff, and he wanted to be able to taste it. The final item on the tray gave him pause.

'...Sugar?' he offered at length, a little falteringly, and Uruha gave another tense flick of his head.

'Yes,' he said, his voice soft and grudging.

'Just – just the one?'

This time, Uruha shot him a glare. 'Yes,' he said tensely. He watched as Die added the sugar and stirred it for him, and only then, with an anxious set of movements, did he let his hands go free. As quickly as he could, he wrapped them both around his cup, and Die watched his fingertips tap patterns of twelve against the glass.

So. Sitting opposite Uruha.

He reminded himself, carefully saying the words aloud in his mind, that this was real.

In front of him the other man shifted constantly. He sat very upright, his spine poker straight, like a cadet's. When it seemed he couldn't resist any longer, he let one long-fingered hand break away from his glass and start to knock rhythmically against his hipbone. The delicate skin on the inside of his wrist was already a strange colour, Die noticed: yellowish, nearly green. He wondered if Uruha did it a lot.

He raked his hands through his hair, and forced a smile.

'Did you go to university here in the city?'

A tiny nod. 'Senshu.'

Sadly, Die tried to wolf-whistle. 'Fancy. How'd you get in there?'

'Dad's an alumnus. He's on the board.' His hand fought to get up to his mouth; grimly he dragged it away and shoved it roughly back between his knees, clamping it there. 'I always wanted to go to dad's university ever since I was little, so it's a dream come true,' he said, the rhythm of his words just slightly off, to Die's ear. Uruha swallowed hard.

Die looked down into his drink. He could see the oiliness of the alcohol in the way it swirled slowly downward through the water, drifting to settle darkly and richly on the bottom of the glass. He saw his own face reflected in it, distorted by the liquid.

'I'm so glad you got what you wanted,' he said mechanically, and Uruha straightened a little.

'Yes.'

Suddenly, Die smiled at him. 'You must have driven your therapists crazy,' he said. The knocking of Uruha's wrist ceased for a second; there was a look of deep confusion across his face and then the movement of his arm resumed again, harder.

'We don't talk about that.'

 

A long silence stretched out between them. Die sipped at his drink: it was good stuff, probably, but it tasted like cardboard in his mouth. When they'd emptied their glasses, Uruha mixed them two more, topping his own off with sugar again. On his desk, the clock ticked. The rain made a pecking sound against the windows.

So many times he'd thought about this; imagined sitting opposite Uruha again. This time there were no nurses to butt in, no sanatorium schedule to adhere to, nobody shouting in the corridors, nobody crying: this time there was quiet, there was privacy, there was time.

And Die didn't have a single thing to say to him. And Uruha looked twitchy and ill-at-ease, as if Die was a stranger.

Which, after almost a decade, he supposed he probably was.

'Last time I saw you,' he mumbled, thinking aloud, 'Was the funeral.'

Uruha didn't say anything. His face appeared frozen.

'I still – I still visit him, sometimes. Whenever I'm home. My family live in Okaura now. He's about an hour away.'

Uruha picked up his glass and took a small sip. He was very determinedly not looking Die in the eyes; his rigid stare was fixed somewhat lower, around Die's neck or chest. When he put his drink down, Die noticed that his fingernails were neat but had been cut brutally short; so short that he could see the darker quicks at their edges. Perhaps he sensed Die's eyes on them: he balled both hands hastily into fists.

At the funeral Uruha had buried himself in Die's arms – or no, not just buried himself, but wrapped his arms around Die's back as well, clung to the folds of his clothing; he had held onto Die as he had been held, the two of them pushing themselves as tightly together as possible in order to squash the terrible, empty space that Aoi had left between them. He had driven Uruha to the train station, and after Toshiya had made his excuses and left them, Uruha had touched his hand over the gear shift. They had driven on, parking up eventually down a shadowy lane that smelled like salt and tree sap. They had taken each other into the back seat of Die's car, and the warmth of their bodies and Uruha's fast, shallow breaths had fogged up the windows against the bright, clear night. And it had been...

Clumsy. Sweet, but sad and awkward and difficult all at the same time. Die had used his hand and the tiny sounds Uruha had made so much more like sobs than anything else; when he came, he was silent. They had lain together, curled up even though they were both too tall for it. He remembered that he had been shaking. Both of them had. When he'd cried, the tears had soaked into Uruha's shirt collar.

'Do you...'

His eyes and nose and throat stung; his voice was raspy. He cleared his throat, blinking quickly to try and stop his vision from wavering and breaking apart. 'Do you still play guitar?' he finished at last, not exactly the question he'd been intending on. He scrubbed the back of his hand quickly over his eyes.

There was a long pause.

'I want to,' Uruha said at last. Almost angrily he twisted his head, touching his chin to his left shoulder, over and over again. He blinked, scrubbed his palms together, started the whole process again with his right shoulder, wrenching his neck around painfully. Die counted twelve times. Twelve more times on the left shoulder, the blink in the middle, the gritted teeth, the scrubbing palms; twelve more times with the right shoulder. He squeezed his fingers so tightly they cracked and made a strangled noise of pain, jerking his elbows out jaggedly; he caught his own drink and the glassware fetched up against the floor with a silly tinkling sound.

When he met Die's eyes, he looked so ashamed that it was all Die could do not to wrap his arms around him.

'Why don't you?' Die managed to ask, and Uruha twitched.

'Can't.'

'Why not?'

His hesitation was such a pitiable thing. He half got to his feet, faltered, bit at the knuckle of his own thumb with such violence that Die was amazed it wasn't bleeding when he withdrew it from his mouth. Fumbling, Uruha reached out, took hold of Die's arm just above the wrist; he pulled him to his feet.

And Die had forgotten, almost, that he and Uruha were the same height. Somehow it had always seemed that they were the small ones and Aoi their giant, their protector, towering over them as tall as a mountain; it was startling, now, to have Uruha eye-to-eye with him, staring at him so lucidly, looking so frightened. He had a split-second to appreciate it, and then Uruha had whirled around, yanking Die along with him; he slammed the door to the study behind them and in the sudden and terrible darkness Die felt himself being tugged along the corridor, borne stumbling up the staircase.

How did Uruha bear it, this darkness? _Why_ did he bear it? Die felt himself tunnelling somewhere, the shadows of Uruha's home wrapping themselves like a piece of smothering black cloth over his nose and mouth: he gripped hard to the thin, wiry strength of Uruha's wrist, as though without it he would be lost in the void forever; he let Uruha drag him upwards, upwards, until with a start and a thud of bone on wood they came up against a door. Dizzy, Die blinked, feeling the darkness spiralling around him. Uruha's fingers were fumbling with his hand now; they drew it forward. He felt cold, hard metal; sharp corners. His thumb slid over an indent, and he frowned.

'Is that a padlock?'

He sensed Uruha turning to face him. Tentatively he raised a hand, felt for him; felt trembling skin and eyelashes and the curve of a cheek against his fingertips.

'Uruha? Is it?'

Against his palm, Uruha nodded.

'And your guitar is in there?'

Another nod. Soft as shadow, he felt Uruha's palm come to rest gently against the back of his hand, and then fall away again.

' _Why_?' Die asked, his voice seeming hoarse and hectoring in the smooth blackness, 'Why would you do that?'

Silence. Almost imperceptibly, Uruha's head shook. Die thought he felt a slight wetness against his thumb, somewhere beneath Uruha's eye.

'Uru,' he said as quietly as he could, 'You don't need to do this.' He paused, a wild debate raging inside of him, but decided to risk it: 'If it's – if it's Aoi, then you know he would have wanted you to go on playing.'

The wrong thing, evidently. The face shrank back from beneath his hand; the skin turned cold, stiff, furious; Uruha's fingers were long and strong and they gripped Die's like iron.

'Get out. Don't you _dare_ tell me what he would have thought.'

'Uruha—!'

He grasped desperately at the wall as he was dragged downward, his feet tripping over the narrow stairs in a way that made his stomach lurch; like a cold and deadly wind Uruha cast him down the hallway, losing Die his bearings in the darkness; there was the scrunching sound of locks being turned and then a merciful flood of daylight, the smell of rain, of greenery in the rain, of green things rotting in the wet—

Uruha's face was visible for a moment, pale and livid and tear-stained.

Then, the door slammed shut in Die's face.

Dizzy, he took a single step backwards.

' _Fuck_!'

The rainsplattered stone echoed it back at him. His heart raced. Gently, he rested his forehead against the wood of Uruha's front door.

 

He remembered that night in the sanatorium; that second, strange night with somebody else's desperate plea for help imprinted on his thumb and Aoi dreamy, quiet, half a world away.

He remembered everything. The smell of the sheets and the paint, the feeling of the carving, the softness of the mattress. When the lights went out, he remembered Aoi's soft voice in the darkness: _Die, why don't you eat?_

He had turned his back. He had pretended not to hear it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the chapter of a thousand iterations. Damn, Uruha is hard to write!


	10. Chapter 10

When the fifth parcel arrived in as many days, Die discovered two things about his parents: that they felt guilty, and that they weren't exactly sure how to talk to him any more. That they didn't feel like they knew him.

They sent him clothes that he couldn't wear because he was stuck in the institutional garb of the sanatorium, thick woollen sweaters as though the winter was here already, although in fact it was still a warm September and each morning broke over the hills like a bright golden swell; they sent him records in cardboard sleeves, purchased in bulk from the _imported – rock_ section of the music store. The books they selected to post to him were fancy clothbound editions of novels that had lived in paperback form on his bedroom shelves for almost as long as he could remember; either they didn't feel confident buying him anything new and trying to guess what he might like, or they simply were out of touch with what he already had. The books had the dusty, almost chemical smell of new fabric: cotton and silk and linen. He piled them up next to his bed in the order he thought he might read them, and then he arranged them alphabetically by author, and then by title, and then by colour so he had a long, long gradient, black to white with everything in between. It passed a little of the time. He had a lot of time to pass, these days.

Therapy. Mealtimes. Books. As the days flattened out into weeks the TV schedule started to feel important: for the first time in his life he knew at what hour the television would be showing programmes for young children and at what time it switched to talk shows, and then soap operas and game shows, and then dramas. The news came on at seven and was his reward for fighting his way through another sticky, gruelling dinnertime: a window into the outside world. Not that the news was so very different, day to day; just the protests in Tokyo, the occasional jarring shot of his university campus, and the Vietnam war. You'd think they'd find something else to talk about.

He wrote back to his parents expressing his gratitude. He sent glowing reports back to them about kindly doctors, wonderful friends, and feelings of peace and health. He didn't want them to feel guilty about how sad and scared and trapped he felt.

It was strange. In a way it wasn't unlike being at university, after everything had kicked off: the way they had scrapped about to fill the hours with classes suddenly cancelled and deadlines postponed indefinitely; the listlessness of reading and rereading what you had; the way his thoughts had seemed to stagnate. That was exactly the word: _stagnate_ , as if all of their minds, once bright and rushing rivers, had suddenly been dammed and left to stand, to grow fetid and rotten, and from those swampy lakes bred restless and invasive life that rose and swarmed and created poisonous miasmas. Gradually, the air between them all had become polluted, and in the restlessness of the strikes, a lie had been born. A terrible, stinking lie that seemed to squirm with insectile life and made his stomach churn and his hand recoil when it tried to bring food to his lips.

He had wanted nothing more, after that, than to be left alone. It amazed him how thoroughly his wish had been granted.

 

It was on his mind as he made his way home from Meguro: how lonely he'd been back then, how... _not there_ , almost. Each mealtime seemed to get easier and easier to get away with; because they thought he was eating they ceased to watch him so closely, and because they ceased to watch him he could get away with not eating. He should have been relieved, but he remembered feeling a contrary sense of fear and panic: so that was it, then. Nobody was going to try to stop him.

He couldn't face the subway. He went into a convenience store and purchased a cheap umbrella. He estimated the walk at about an hour, perhaps a little longer if you accounted for him following less direct streets and dawdling through the city parks. It didn't matter. His hand went numb around the handle of the umbrella but that didn't matter, either.

Incredible to think that he'd managed to feel lonely with Aoi around, just a seat or two away from him at mealtimes and just a few feet away at night. He had to keep reminding himself that it had been his choice: that he'd deliberately stayed away, avoiding him wherever possible. It wasn't that he'd ignored him – nothing as unforgivable as all that – but he'd been civil; nothing more. _Hi_ , he'd said, and _good night_ , and _excuse me_. When Aoi asked him questions he thinned out his answers like he'd thinned out his body, leaving no room for follow-ups. It was a satisfaction, almost, like taking a vow of silence. Alone, he could be virtuous.

It surprised him how physically his sadness hit him, like a punch in the stomach, knocking the breath out of him: time with Aoi, hour upon precious hour, and he'd wasted it. And Aoi, quick as ever, had caught on; _he_ had been civil, too. But then he stopped trying.

At the edge of a busy road Die steadied himself against a lamppost. He noticed that he'd let his umbrella drop down by his side when the rain started to feel warm on his stiff, numb face; he watched his hand on the metal, thought what a weird thing it was that he should be connected to a hand like that, that he could control it without even consciously thinking about it; what an odd coincidence it was that he had come to exist in this place, in this time. He was so lucky that it made him ache. It struck him that his curse was that he might never understand any of it.

He stood there a good long while. He thought about the world, and then Japan, and then Tokyo, and then Uruha's house. He thought about the small strange wonder of Uruha serving him alcohol, offering it to him like it was nothing. He'd never gotten the chance to have a drink with Aoi. He remembered how Aoi had tried to create what he steadfastly called _prison wine_ , secretly collecting up pulpy fragments of fruit and crumbled bits of bread from the dinner table, and mixing up everything together in a plastic bag with some hot water. They'd kept it under the bed but it had started to smell so awful so quickly that Aoi had ended up tipping it out of the window, giggling wildly all the while. His eyes had flashed with mischief and he'd tackled Die around the waist, every ounce of his wiry, determined strength pulling him down onto the bed and pushing their bodies together.

The sorrow he felt was so sharp that Die had to rub at his chest, as if the pain could somehow dissipate out across his torso.

 

In the hospital he talked to Kai, and he talked to Kosuke. Kyo was silent, and Shinya slept or played chess by himself, and Uruha turned his nose up at him. And then of course, there was Aoi.

He talked to Fukui, and he talked to the nurses, and he talked to his parents on the phone. When he'd been there for three weeks, they came to visit, and after they'd visited they left again. It was most of the way through September, by then, and the weather was starting to turn: the mornings were getting chillier, and sometimes there was mist clinging to the grass and condensation beading the tops of the windows. He grew to know Aoi's morning routine of reaching back to grab the bars over the window, still half-asleep, and using them to drag himself messily upright and around. Tousle-haired and pale-faced, he would peer through to the outside; on the damp mornings he would run the tip of his finger right across the top of the glass, sending water droplets streaming down the windowpane. His breath misted the glass. He pressed his forehead against the bars.

 

_I hear the train a-coming,_

_It's rolling round the bend,_

_And I ain't seen the sunshine_

_Since I don't know when..._

The laminated NO TOUCHING sign was back around Aoi's neck as he lightly twirled on the spot, Uruha's fingers clasped loosely in his own and a cigarette held between his teeth.

'You know where Folsom Prison is?' he asked, his voice a little muffled by the butt clamped between his lips. It was a bizarre scene: Uruha stood stiffly motionless as Aoi danced a sarcastic sort of jitterbug around him, his bare toes pale on the floor. His hand and arm was all that moved; he was letting Aoi use it as a kind of prop to spin around and dip beneath. When Aoi fell suddenly into a drop, forcing him to take his weight, Uruha scowled darkly and pulled his hand back, crossing his arms firmly across his chest.

'I do!' Kai said enthusiastically, all but hopping on the spot to keep up with Aoi's more fluid movements. 'It's in...'

'Oh, Kai has it. Yes?'

'It's...America, isn't it?'

'Oh, you hear that? It's in _America_.' Aoi's smile showed teeth; deftly he flicked Kai on the forehead. 'Where _about_ in America, genius?'

Kai's face lapsed into uncertainty and Aoi laughed, pulling him away from where he'd been lingering against the wall and steering him lightly around his makeshift dance floor. By pushing all the armchairs in the music room back, and trying and failing to shift the piano closer to the wall, he'd managed to clear an area of perhaps five by six feet: not really enough room to dance with somebody unless you held them pretty close to you. Standing somewhat rigidly by the wall, Kosuke gave Die a darkly significant look, and Die took a deep pull of his cigarette. The lot of them had been cleared out of the TV room so that a pair of orderlies could repaint the wall around the window, and it seemed that nobody was in much of a mood to be sat alone in their dorms; outside a misty rain had started collecting on the windows and perhaps they all felt, as Die did, that the bedrooms just felt too claustrophobic on such a grey day. The fogginess outside made the hills seem to be drawing in closer, and the cloudy air had a sense of crowding in against the windows. Even Kyo and Shinya had emerged, although you couldn't really call them involved: Kyo was seated on the floor beneath the window, reading a book with its paper cover ripped off, and Shinya was drawing intricate patterns with a fingertip on the threadbare arm of his chair. Aoi had requested the _Walk The Line_ LP from Die's collection with shocking politeness, and now he seemed determined to keep them entertained by any means necessary.

'Can anyone get closer than America?' he asked, spinning Kai enthusiastically around whilst the other man giggled uncontrollably. 'How about you, Uru?'

Uruha set his face stubbornly. 'The South,' he said in a quiet voice.

'The South. Okay, okay...Kosuke?'

'Leave me alone, Aoi.'

'Oh, _ouch_.'

A skinny knee suddenly landed on the arm of Die's chair, and Aoi's lean body loomed over him, dangerously close to the lit end of Die's cigarette. 'How about you, Slim? Any guesses?'

Die didn't meet his eyes. 'It's in California, I think.'

'You don't have to talk to him, Die,' Kosuke said loudly.

There was an ugly pause.

Hovering nervously, Kai pulled hard at his lower lip, and Uruha's face seemed to have frozen. As for Aoi – it was funny; Die wasn't sure if he'd really seen it or not, but it seemed that just for a split second, some kind of hard-to-understand expression had passed over his face: discomfort, or humiliation, or even pain. A little stiffly, he moved backward, setting both feet back down on the floor again. He closed his eyes briefly, and then pushed a grin over his face.

'Nobody _has_ to talk to me, 'Suke,' he said in a light tone of voice, 'They do it because I'm just so much fun.'

Kosuke looked upset: he kept scrubbing his palms against the sides of his pants.

'I'll tell the nurses you've been dancing. Touching.'

Kai lowered his head and wrapped his arms tightly around it, his elbows looking touchingly fragile at their odd, exposed angle. Aoi's face darkened.

'Why don't you go ahead and do that then,' he said tightly. Kosuke bit at his lower lip, his eyes downcast.

'I will,' he said.

'Fine.'

But he didn't move. He just went on standing by the wall, a miserable look on his face, scrubbing his hands over and over. _Folsom Prison Blues_ gave way to _Give My Love to Rose_ , and Die smoked nervously. The song was too slow to dance to, anyway. A few heavier drops of rain tapped against the window, and he rubbed at his forehead, feeling the start of a headache.

People were looking at him, like they were waiting for him to say something. Aoi was looking at him, even though Uruha was standing next to him and blocking him, slightly, like a bodyguard, and Kai was making a soft noise from underneath the shield of his own arms.

Die stared hard at the floor. He smoked.

 

By the time Die arrived back at his apartment building, he was soaked to the bone and shivering. He realised belatedly that he'd managed to leave his new umbrella by the lamppost he'd stopped at: _easy come, easy go_ his mind told him mockingly. _Genius_.

It occurred to him that his own mind wasn't always very nice to him. He pushed the button for the elevator and slumped in a corner, waiting for the doors to slide silently closed: once they did there was a muffled sort of silence that felt good. The tinny sort of echo that surrounded his own breaths and the gentle drip, drip, drip of rainwater from his clothes seemed to match the closed-off, metallic sounds inside his own head. He rubbed hard at the bridge of his nose.

On the other hand, he was cold. Not rain cold but sort of frozen cold, _steel_ cold, like it was coming from inside of him.

'Get a grip,' he said, his voice quiet but almost violently cheerful, and stabbed the button for his floor. The elevator worked so smoothly that it was hard to tell if it was moving or not, but the buttons on the panel were steadily lighting up and dimming again, tracking his progress up. When he got to his own floor and found Toshiya curled up in an equally soaking-wet bundle outside of his apartment door, he didn't say anything; just jammed his key into the lock and nodded Toshiya inside.

Inside, the grey rainy light made everything look depressing. He tried turning on the ceiling light, but the yellow fake-warmth of it made him feel even worse; he snapped it off again.

He sat down very suddenly on the floor. It seemed that his legs didn't really want to support him any more: all right, fine. He stared at his hands. He tried to figure out what magic it was that made them move when he wanted them to; _before_ he wanted them to. He could command them, say the words in his mind, but that was a fake. Nothing happened without the magic, and all the control he'd ever had over his own self had only ever been an illusion. He wondered if he was going to throw up.

'Hey. Hey.'

Something was tugging at the shoulder of his shirt, and then a bony hand was snapping its long, thin fingers in front of his eyes. 'C'mon, Die. Wake it up.'

He looked up and found Toshiya dripping on him.

'Wasn't expecting to see you back,' he said listlessly, and Toshiya gave an uncomfortable shrug.

'Shouldn't have let me in the first time,' he confessed a little apologetically. 'Bad chickens come home to roost. Or whatever the expression is.'

'I don't know how much evil a chicken can really get into,' Die said numbly, but he allowed Toshiya to pull him back up to his feet.

'C'mon. You're shivering.'

'So are you.'

'Yeah, I'm cold as fuck.' Toshiya sniffed, swiping quickly at his nose. 'Come _on_.'

It was easier just to let him lead. Die followed docilely as Toshiya marched him into the bathroom, and perched obediently on the edge of the bathtub as Toshiya leant over him and rather haphazardly poked the plug into place and threw open the faucets. Steam rose. Die allowed himself a small spell of sitting with his eyes closed: he felt exhausted and strangely faint, as though he wasn't really there.

'Why'd you have a western-style tub?' Toshiya asked interestedly.

'Western-style?'

'You know. Long.'

'Because _I'm_ long.'

Toshiya tugged at Die's saturated shirt. 'Off.'

With a little difficulty, Die obeyed. It was sticking damply to his skin and seemed to be tightening around his neck as he fought against it; he heard Toshiya snort and smiled reluctantly. It was nice, sitting in this echoey room and letting the steam from the bath gradually warm him; it was nice to keep his eyes closed and to be quiet and let somebody else make the decisions for him. He heard Toshiya's foosteps padding around the bathroom; he heard them retreat down the corridor and, a few seconds later, a soft swell of music from the corridor that chased on Toshiya's heels as he returned: _I'm sailing away, set an open course for the virgin sea..._

He let out a slow breath, and only opened his eyes when he heard a gentle splash from behind him. Toshiya's clothes were puddled on the floor, and Die raised his eyebrows, twisting around to face his friend. Cross-legged in the water, his bare skin already turning pink, Toshiya smiled at him placidly.

'Come on in. Water's lovely.'

More out of surprise than anything else, Die laughed.

'You're kidding, I hope.'

'Dead serious,' Toshiya said, arranging his face into an expression that suggested somebody beloved had recently died. He flicked a little water at Die. 'Get in. I promise I won't tell anyone.'

Steadily, Die stared at him; Toshiya grinned back challengingly. 'It's so lovely and warm,' he said innocently, and Die rolled his eyes as he got to his feet. It felt like someone else's body as he stripped off the rest of his clothes and stepped up over the lip of the tub, settling himself up to his waist in warm water, leaning back and letting Toshiya grin at him as the steam rose. He kept his arms under the water, where the great bruises that ran up the inside of them could ripple away into nothing.

'You gonna tell me about it?' Toshiya asked, leaning his head lazily back over the edge of the tub; and slowly, falteringly, Die started to do so.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I'm _not_ dead, but in this heat I may as well be. Hope you can read this through the sweat.


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